Plague Postcards
(August 12, 2020)
I’m doing a series of “plague” postcards
Each is the cover of a book
The Plague as Metaphor by Susan Sontag
The Pest by Albert Camus
The Effect of the Corona Virus on Sales of Corona Beer
by Wharton School Professor Siegel
What Ovid (Would Have) Made of Covid
by Gilbert Highet and Helen MacInnes
The Pandemic and Me by Andrew Cuomo
The Pandemic and Chaos Theory by Tohu Va Bohu
When the Plague Came to Prague by Joseph K.
How to Play the Pandemic by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
What Comes After Covid 19 by Dr. Congo
What Happened to the First Eighteen by Philip K. Dick
After Hölderlin
(August 13, 2020)
Hard to grasp but
near me to dream
God next yet ecstasy
and faster than spirit
in twilight to visit
Alps, eagles, abyss,
streams, gardens, joy,
because love could end.
Yet the evening lasted.
Yet the night endured.
Sonnet in the Postmodern Manner
(August 20, 2020)
When lust circulated around the room
like a joint, we skinny dipped in ponds
and praised the glory of veneris mons.
It was 1973. How glorious in the gloom
of this August that riot of red geraniums
reddens the afternoon, and I reserve the right
to return there, to resist the prevailing wisdom
and mourn a discourse dominated by doom-
sayers, time-wasters who talk all day and say
nothing, like a faculty meeting’s journey into night
but even more toxic, with nothing resolved, no light
shed on the nothingness (and then the sonnet
ends with a heartfelt closing couplet:
“and yet and yet and yet and yet and yet.”)
Roulette Wheel
(August 25, 2020)
On Leonard Bernstein’s birthday
I play his overture to Candide
and as I listen I wonder
how many of my peers are writing
a journal of the plague year?
I am, too, only mine is called
“Roulette Wheel” which for
the record states that life
is a gamble sustained by faith
in which, in the long run, you lose
whether you use
the Martingale or d’Alembert
systems of winning at roulette,
but along the way you may
“complete a number”
with a chip on 11 and chips
across the border
of its eight neighbors
and 11 comes up twice in a row.
Cambridge
(September 20, 2020)
What did you study at Cambridge?
Detective novels and after-dinner liqueurs
(Drambuie, Cointreau, Tia Maria)
I learned poverty and sex from Henry Miller
poverty and politics from George Orwell
youth from Hemingway and Fitzgerald
America from Mark Twain
England from the National Portrait Gallery
Paris from the café poems of Apollinaire
London from Paddington and King’s Cross
Marxism from the red light district in Amsterdam
The Nineteenth Century from War and Peace
Europe from a jet d’eau in Geneva
Anti-Semitism from the occasional confidence
of a stranger at a bar who didn’t know I was Jewish.
September Song
(September 30, 2020)
With Cannonball Adderley’s
“Jeannette”
in the background, I review
the month, the Supreme Court justice
who died on the eve of Rosh Ha’shanah,
the ten unseasonably warm days of awe
in the hammock, surrounded by
a transition of maples
from green to yellow, and my enjoyment of
a novel by Irwin Shaw (Nightwork),
a song by Ben Sidran (“Good Travel Agent”),
Rhonda Hamilton’s taste on “Real Jazz” (Sirius 67),
the sadness of knowing
each day shorter, each morning colder,
from here on out as reality sinks in
and suddenly it’s fall.
David Lehman's new books are The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir (Cornell University Pressd, 2022) and a collection of poems, The Morning Line (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). He is series editor of The Best American Poetry and chief editor of the BAP blog. (https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/).