As In Real Life
Emily Spacek
I awoke on a Monday morning
and dressed anew with cracked
hands gray and blue.
Last week I was cutting my own hair, dyeing
it alternates shades of gray and blue.
In May we rushed to the garden store and
traded in our bookshelf for a planter box, only
by then had waited too long before asking:
Will anything survive this? Can language or earth
turn over the unbearable?
As in real life, I could hardly notice it
the space around us holding open
a mild lyric, a melancholy embrace,
an undone clasp
of regret.
The virus came as my grief—given life—
and I sat on my couch for five days, happy
that I remembered to fill the bird feeders. And the birds
were wild then, cannonballing betwixt the late July breeze
the center of some story occurring outside of me.