The Covid Time

I had stopped the counting of the days.

That was my first clue

The Angry God did not much like it.

It was removed like lint, like blush in a wrong shade.

I do all that is asked.

I wash my hands cracked; I wear a mask.

I need no atlas to feel the tract of land that I have traveled.

Ghosts have come and left, unsatisfied I didn’t cry.

They knew I was on to them,

that they cannot fly or make those trademark noises

in the night. They are in the mind’s third eye,

easily shut and destroyed on sight.

The clock has slowed and raced..

I don’t know the reason; it’s like that now.

And I have loosened somehow.

I now fit inside my days.

We go together places that are hidden:

the mountainside, the woods,

the unkempt landscape, beautiful and quietly disinterested.

And, no, Shiva is not done. I can feel him still. I read the papers.

He appreciates I do not judge

the dark dissolve of his anointed purpose, of this hell created.

I have lived too long to think I know.

I have lived to see how wrong I was

and the bright that came from error,

so unimagined, so slippery in a brand new sun.

We have stepped from stone to stone to stone.

We are looking up, arriving at the place that we have left,

unknown to us, where we’ve grown,

where we will census what hasn’t been born yet.