~for Lori Jones McCaffery~
Lori Jones McCaffery commenting on
“a new time (poetry in the time of pandemic)”^
“Tender and brutal at the same time. Like the times.”*
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your observation, a commission, opens an incision,
bleeding out a Noah flood vision:
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when we begin, to compare and contrast the movable tender and the unstoppable brutal, the poetry must rise to equalize the pressure of unbalanced times, the tender, and the brutal in an uneasy peaceful coexistence, at the same time, same place
The Brutal The Tender
————— —————
life in the epicenter, the greatest, in the darkened bedroom,
noisiest city, now landscape she awakens, her hand quick
painting quiet, comes to rest on my chest,
one lives/writes/eyesights thru the quality of motion+volume
pink mask + a minimum six of heartbeats, is it loud enough,
feet of separation, steady on, no need to dial 911!
a citified tableau of macro wave she unaware that I can hear
forces in crashing collision, upon her loud, tender exhalation
your skin’s cells celebrating surviving day#?
newspaper images of Death’s many volunteer, food delivery,
ministers applauding the newly though I am asymptomatic
arrived mobile morgues, for 100 my request tenderly, firmly
died yesterday, denied, for I meet too many
their brutal death rattles of the vulnerable criteria,
overwhelmed the super-surround. instead, offering food to me,
sound silences of to deliver to me, to deliver me,
brutal emptiness of millions of tenderly I say, no thanks,
sacrificial my tour of duty, almost done
all of us isolate lambs, in day jailed,
for we still breathing the maybe tainted,
oxygen molecules of no safe surety
a consummate perfection, the same, taming words I tell
the holy quietus of my son, young father,
those no longer breathing, tender me necessary tasks that
they now rest up above, require outside journeys, say I
hid in a white cumulus send me into the red hot areas
cloud cover, a noise suppressing insert me into the front line,
sky coverlet, moving across a militarized zones, he replies,
bright blue pure background, ”you’re too old, part and
a train of funeral caissons, parcel of the most vulnerable,
brutal noisy hooves clacking better-write-you tender-poems”
daily, hourly, the statistical alerts, why so hard, to write tender
brief résumés delivered, so easy of the brutal, their
drumbeating, look now! curses so readily supplied,
are you up to date? is tenderness short supplied?
catalog the debris, organized with brutal necessary efficacy, quantify, qualify the costs, include even the tender ineffable, countdown and graph the brutal calculus of the curve infection, and you, numbed, past the point of eyes capable of what once was tender droplet tearing
highlight the unknown faraway, the tender hope of a distant apex inflection, while plotting the second derivative, the rate of change of the rate of a brutal yet trending upward *****, the ascending all-inclusive stat, infected, the rate of change of decedents, downed, descending, giving in...gowned in hospital blue, for the funeral pyre
a city of lines, crosswalks, velvet ropes, unused, unemployed, social separators, no one about to need to separate, anymore, only the living and the dead, both staying indoors, so neither in attendance, at the empty funeral services, everybody is on the out list...
the now newly indistinguishable, the irresistible collision of two one-sides polarizing poles of no longer opposites, the tender and the brutal in a single embrace, but no, not kissing, embargoed, as we are stationed from above, far, high up on the watchtower observatory, observing the contrast dye that flies so fast on people denuded grand boulevards, down narrow hospital hallways, body-lined decorated, tales of millions of lives isolatized, and don’t forget the brutalizing discovery of scores of elderly, dying alone, withering in the dark, counted, lumped in to the category of statistically irrelevant, if dead, who cares, matters not now, in the afterworld no one asks how,
in a fashion both tenderly and brutal,
what was the actual cause?