Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.
― Dan Albergotti
(thank you to Matthew Ogle’s Pome tinyletter for this poem)
***
The days roll and mash together. Like the dough for sourdough bread under certain hands. My fingers tap tap at the keyboard and I watch E. make a different kind of dough every day: Dumpling dough. Autumn maple rye dough. Lemon peel blueberry scone dough. Buttermilk biscuit dough. My twin sister, a physician, is being retrained to work in the ICU.
We watch Elton John’s living room benefit concert. We put on musicals in the living room. J. makes a Tik Tok video. We eat cake for breakfast. Every day I have this particular brand of “survivor’s guilt” – what can I do as a knowledge worker who has the privilege of working in the safety of my home? How can I help? I collect ways to help. It doesn’t feel like enough. I know there are people everywhere who need help. I practice my Mandarin to help answer a hotline for the elderly who need assistance. It doesn’t feel like enough.
Nature doesn’t notice, it moves forward anyway: the cherry blossoms burst into song. The rain falls from infinite blue skies. From my window, I can see the red-breasted robins dance together. I watch the flowers grow. My eyelashes fall out. I don’t finish any books, I read a few pages and can’t go on. There is currently no feeling of future except more sickness, more death, so I’m relieved that the same people text me every day. We text about groceries, the rain, the garlic scapes, dating over FaceTime. It is comforting to develop a pattern again. A. reminds me of the three words of intention I set at the beginning of this year: stillness. creativity. abundance.
Here, in the belly of the whale: all of this time, abundant time. Here, in the belly of the whale: all of this stillness, abundant stillness. Here, in the belly of the whale: all of this bread, abundant bread. Out there, people are dying. There will be more soup, E. tells me when I try not to finish the soup. I don’t believe him that there will be more, so I don’t finish the soup.
He makes more soup.