Field Hospital, Central Park
For Stuart Kramer
Not for circuses or camping or selling cotton candy
Not for tag sales or county fairs, or places to repent
No, these come with blood in a bag and everything handy
To keep you alive, these unflappable tents
So unwanted, so necessary, and so stark
These newest visitors to Central Park.
Yet if I were afflicted and lay on a gurney
And were given a choice for my final trip
Here’s how I’d plan the journey:
First I’d pass by the cabin on the hospital ship
And I’d waive a booth at the convention center
Then we cruise by the fountains and the lake
Till we spot that one, the ICU in the meadow,
That bed by the tent flap, where the sun can enter.
Face Off Limits
Ever since the new mandate
We’ve been thinking about our face
We ten fingers, by ones and by twos.
Who always make our way up to you
Yet with so much new time on our hands, so to speak
We’ve been wondering what it is we seek
That, unrestrained, we’d rise, so they say
To make contact with you ninety times a day
To touch your nose your eyes, to scratch an itch
No, it’s more: something like relieving an existential twitch
As we can’t keep away from you, your every pore and protrusion
Are we collecting evidence you’re not an illusion?
Yet if you are, we’ll remain down here and so be it
We’re oddly calmer than ever now that you’re off limits.
Spring Day
Daffodills, magnolias, hoppy robins, frisky squirrels, and crocuses
Everything’s going out and coming up and flowering except us
Convince yourself all this dying’s part of the cycle, the renewal of things edenic
Yet will the other creatures even notice, or miss us, in a time of pandemic?