The Punctuation of Coronavirus Time

To read Proust
is to begin to see like Proust.
It’s like tripping on magic mushrooms:

everything slows down
and you fall in love
with life’s trivial details,

which really aren’t all that trivial.
For instance, I’ve discovered
a splendid symmetry:

just as Neal, our axolotl,
wriggles to the surface
of the aquarium

to oxygenate his plump little white body,
Chicken, our cat, leaps up
to the surface

of the very same aquarium
to hydrate
his fluffy white body.

Our pretty beasts perform
these life-giving rituals
of calibration

at regular intervals,
each and every day;
and in so doing,

they provide the story
of my quarantined life
with much needed punctuation—

like the Muslim call to prayer,
or the periodic smoke-breaks
of the nicotine addict.

One paragraph ends, another begins,
and we peak at the body count,
waiting for the storm to arrive.

Because the cat needs water,
the axolotl needs air, and the man
needs some punctuation

to break-up
all of these run-on sentences
of slow-motion horror.

—John Faithful Hamer, Social Distancing (2020)