Closed For The Season

We are playing roulette at home,
the Strip in Vegas has closed. Here
we spin the dial, throw dice,

and use quarters and dimes
to pay for winning hands…oh dear
I meant elbows.. Do you remember

the coins? They used to mean
sweets and bread, a call from
a phone booth. Now, they serve

in our home-bound game,
in quarantine, but my kids
are grown and I can only play

in my head. The Viber app
is ready, WhatsApp, Zoom,
but I prefer to imagine

the board. Do you remember,
Son, how my Queen challenged
your bishop and castle

but got snatched by your knight.
Up and across he went and
so did my paternal pride. I miss

those games. They were almost
the last ones I played before
turning to poetry full time,

obsessed with the page
to the point of forgetting
cherries on the trees outside,

or films. My daughter, how
do you spend these days
in Parana? I know, watching Netflix,

reading, playing with your cousin,
dancing in your head. Let me
beam in when you have a moment,

share the quarantine across
America, the global village,
marooned in the solar system,

board games on screen,
in memory, the Strip,
which I have yet

to visit in this existence,
closed for the season
of the plague.

(March 19, 2020)

Vaccine Coming ‘Round The Bend

Ghost train, a couple of stragglers passenger
along, who decided to brave and manifest
their psychosis, having somewhere to go,
engineer of course driving, and the power
grid giving cars their juice. On parallel tracks
freight moved in its inexorable way, food,
goods, feed, we cannot stop everything,

even in a pandemic. But we are sitting back,
watching the market tumble, our mother
stumble out of bed to the sink. Damn
this rhyme, but I will let it go like the bird
who kept me company, that secret hope.
Of what? Wealth? A room so large where
I could stretch with a thousand books?

What rooms and fields does Valhalla provide
to new arrivals? Shall I give up the earthly
dream as well of a stable, ordered place, where
children feel safe and blessed, milk tumbling
out of the pitcher, bread with peanut butter,
an idli with samba?. I feel like traveling
the gastronomic world to distract myself

in this time of plague. Plagued with memories
of the myriad, mellifluous landscapes
I have been privileged to gaze upon,
to which I must say goodbye
like all of us, whether we have room
to stretch with our books,
our beloved before us to whom

we entrust the flame along
with our children nearby,
to give them a last piece of advice.
Damn. This is a time to say
thank-you and to praise. We will
survive. We got through the previous
cullings, the plagues of history

described in books our children
must now consult—if they can—
on line. And the vaccine
is coming in time for some
of our kind. I wonder if we will
make enough to share with our dogs
and cats, the birds we let fly.

(March 18, 2020)