The Burning

COVID. But the sorrow doesn’t stop.

The best escapes from lockdown have meant walks in the woods. I can praise our favorite trails or new lush spots that friends in our small pod have shown us. Spring! Into summer! Time still passes. Thus those silent birds with nothing to say in March now sing out of lust for offspring or territory, first wildflowers like Bloodroot, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Trillium come and gone, sunlight in the leafed-out trees a dappled flourish.  I've learned new things from field guides long ignored, i.e., the diameter of the Maple out back makes it 150 years old. One foot = a half century. (Happy birthday!) For a while, I told everyone: Guess the natural world didn't get the bad-news-Covid memo!  A lovely spring, I said ad nauseam, in glad disbelief. A little coolish, my mother would've put it, if she still could. But I wrote that before, in a poem.  

My point: Since Pliny the Elder, 70-whatever CE but even earlier, we've paid some attention—in poetry and beyond—to the natural world. Here's the end of his bio: after writing the 37 books of his Naturalis Historia, the most exhaustive study we have from the Ancients, no bestiary stranger or more surreal, Pliny died near Pompeii of fumes from the fiery rain of Vesuvius. That famously food-loving genius insomniac heroically crossed the Bay of Naples in a small boat to rescue a friend in direct line of a volcanic eruption that would bury two cities. As for his Natural History, I suspect the most curious Pliny would have given a lot to add Australia to his everywhere hoard of everything. Such astonishing wildlife there, science still perplexed as to how such oddities got to that continent in the first place. (Ask the Indigenous Elders, I want to say.)

I mention Australia because I spent five months there on a Fulbright last year observing Kangaroos, Wallabies, Emus, Koalas and preparing to write my own neo-ancient/medieval bestiary. And the quirky, capable Pliny, first looker, somehow ended up in those poems as fuse and startle, a now and then forget-me-not though I didn't fully invite him. It's how poems work, laying claim then losing track of stumbled well-meaning starts, intention itself not worth much.

My begging bowl from Australia still overfloweth with a mythic strangeness. Plus, after we left, the real heartbreak began, great fires ravishing thousands of hectares, nearly three billion beloved animals burned alive or starved to rag and bone, their habitats in ruin. A grief, a hall of mirrors of grief, a whole outback of grief, multiple reefs of grief, one smoky borderless cloud of grief. Terrible footage on American TV and websites, more terrible emails from friends in Australia. Days ashy as night, people going to bed in gasmasks, and at Tidbinbilla, the nature reserve near Canberra, the wonders my husband and I as volunteers saw—platypus, black swans, koalas, a wily one-winged pelican—packed up and moved out of the line of (literal) fire.

Any era's natural history is alarming, but given climate's disastrous changes, our moment feels so end-of-it, like Covid-19 itself. And the red-hot burn-alert this past winter from Australia fast became world prophecy, another similarity. Well into February, even at a distance and an ocean between, the horrific light of those flames darkened each poem coming out of me. Correction: came through me, my attempt to put words on a page a means, not a source. All poets, I think, understand that drill.

I hesitate to say all poets. All anything, for that matter. Uncertainty and mystery make background music for poetry's begging bowl held out to collect what images of the world fall our way. But tragic times take such a bowl back to the potter's wheel, hands full of mud and water, time given to shaping something that will harden to the made thing in the searing kiln. A specific how-to: you lean in is what I remember as the soggy mess threatens every second to spin off the wheel and all over you. After each day at the pottery, I biked home soaked in clay, in earth, most profound stuff of the planet, my jeans and shirt drying thick with it. An elemental self-realization of sorts.  Dust to dust. Through a glass darkly. Okay.

It's analogy then, to say our pandemic carries a similar inflation and reduction within its narrative, this Covid-19 with its infectious microscopic agents of fear and possible death on ordinary doorknobs, steering wheels, boxes and mailed envelopes, in what comes out of human lungs when anyone says hello. On go the masks for any planned or chance encounter. You can't wait to get back to the car after a grocery run, to remove it. A deep breath to love air unhindered again.

Like writing that bestiary did the crucial proverbial thing for me, the strange turning familiar, the familiar strange until it scared me, beauty intensified by the threatened state of so much: the Brush-tailed Rock Wallaby, only 80-some left in the world or the ancient rivers and streams dried to dusty ribbons in a seemingly perpetual drought, brittle eucalyptus and scrub poised to fuel the fires to come, the gorgeous endless desolation of the Outback we circled in a rented yellow car our final 30 days in Australia. As we began that drive toward the storied, dreaded Nullarbor Plain and parts west then north then straight down through the middle of a continent, a friend—exasperated and worried—kept warning us: nothing to see!

No, not nothing. Look into a favorite poem for practice. It's vast in there too. Or consider the death counts on the evening news, lives lived behind numbers.

We can bad-dream backwards too.  Pliny began Book 1 of his Natural History with a question carried out from the ancient world that burns in my bestiary's prologue because—full disclosure—I did invite him in after all, and struck his five words like a match, trying to light my book: The world, is it finite? A question anyone facing a pandemic—or the die-off of so many species—must feel. And don't all questions burn?

Poetry goes sideways to suggest, layer up, connect. We digress to think clearly by imagining like, as, is, the great equations, a redefinition. That leap is metaphoric, what marks a poet a poet, said Aristotle of whom Pliny was wildly jealous, the standard admiring (and witty and disdainful) Roman take on the Greek intelligentsia, the ones who got there first and so gracefully.

We can read earlier eras like a mirror or crystal ball, and other poems shadowed by grim, if only for company during our pandemic, bodies burning up with fever and secreted from families, the lists of those who haven't survived announced daily. I continually think of Ellen Bryant Voigt's Kyrie, published 1992 in the wake of AIDS though brilliantly focused on the 1918 Flu Epidemic that wiped out millions worldwide.

You wiped a fever-brow, you burned the cloth.
You scrubbed a sickroom floor, you burned the mop.
What wouldn't burn you boiled like applesauce
out beside the shed in the copper pot.
Apple, lightwood, linen, feather-bed—
It was the smell of that time, that neighborhood.
All night the pyre smoldered in the yard….

There's burning, a burning past in that pyre, into a future. Our own temperatures could shoot up for days on end in the months ahead.

A finite thing or not, the writing we do—