by Jim Moore, published in the New Yorker, 3/28/22

1

Someone will need to forgive me for being who I am, for sneaking back to my blue chair

by the window, where for the last three hundred and seventy days I have learned that to be alone is what is good for me. I am pretending

as if I really belong with those who want to return to this world with open arms, even though it has done to us

what it has done. I wish I could love like that, instead of wanting to turn my back on it all,

as if life in the world were a marriage assumed too young and necessarily left behind.

Try as I might I will never become one of the world’s faithful ones.

My naked face and your naked face, maskless. A cold March dawn,

harsh sunlight, impersonal and honest, mindless like the light from a surgeon’s lamp

worn on the forehead as you peer down into the wound. Nothing in this new life

is asked of me except to remember how small I am.

2

Sometimes the world won’t let itself be sung. Can’t become a poem. Sometimes

we are sane, but sanity alone is not enough. Warm moonlight and wind. I am sitting here,

simply breathing because there is no other way to be with those who no longer can.

I don’t know what to say about it all, but if you do please show me how to be you.

In the last play I saw, fourteen months ago, before there were no more plays,

they had made a sea of the stage. Songs were chanted on its shore. Lives lived. People pretended to die

and a ship sailed into the night. A moon. One star. Afterward, applause. Then began that long silence

which it is now time for me to admit I have loved beyond any reason or defense. Who among us

has not seen that star to the left of the lockdown moon, shining

as the ship sets sail?