During the Pandemic, I Lose My Spelling
The first word I tried
to spell and lost was Lisa.
When I needed it, I couldn’t
get the letters right for business,
incarnate, freely, or rough.
The year never quite filled up
with anything that stuck.
Each word fleeced an imprint
on my mind’s hot sand
where I’d buried telegenic, tortoise, oriole,
and leapt. I’d buried the lead
in a place I couldn’t stand, so hot
I wouldn’t go there. We lost
so much in a year, Mary, Lance:
we didn’t quite have funerals.
A queue of barefoot pallbearers
nursing burning toes
wasn’t a uniform, conventional
gathering. Each day
was just an echo of the conventions
we were too high ashore to remember,
missing letters from missing people,
every blank space a shoveling out.
