Hope in the Time of Coronavirus

The sun was high in the sky,
the mechanics were welding,
the binmen were clattering,
my landlord was chopping wood
when I woke up,
head hammering with brittle futures
and crumbling economies,
head hammering with
syringes, with Satanic
corporations and conspiracies,
with visions of commands
in microchips
in humanity
in chains,
with marks of the beast,
with the two-decade-long
ambulance siren of loneliness
in my stomach
reaching its deafening,
workless, cashless,
publess, conversationless,
polythene-gloved, mask-gagged,
laptop-hypnotised,
auto-ejaculating,
turning-Chinese, corporate-socialist
howling crescendo
as I shuffled across my cage
of unwashed plates, unfiled documents,
unread books,
unswept clumps of self-cut hair,
to the unscrubbed toilet within a
sky-scraping, turtle-choking, radiation-beaming,
forest-gobbling virus-ridden
toilet.
 
I’d first caught sight of your
nurse-impersonating, cloth-ensconced face
on a nearly-empty bus,
“Are you the girl from the Internet?”
and now I’m homing in on you,
over the newly-budding,
deer-trampled, stork-pecked fields. A breeze
tickles the warming springtime air
and I can see the church
in a straight line ahead of me. Somewhere
inside that still-towering,
still-singing, still-hoping hallmark of Europe
there’s a Father Gombrowicz,
Zbigniew to his uncle and auntie,
yanking on a bell-rope,
flooding the air with brass and god,
Zbiggi the Ropeman to his mates,
spinner of biblical and home-made yarns,
vermouth-lubricated tales
of trumpet lessons in Chernobyl.
He hurled grenades in Afghanistan
for Communism or Capitalism,
I forget which one,
but now he huddles in a confession booth,
half-priest, half-psychotherapist,
unravelling the ropes of
the beaten housewife
the alcoholic greengrocer
the cheated butcher
the bankrupt hairdresser
the sick doctor
and stopping them
from hanging themselves.
 
Through the up-thrusting grass
and dandelions and wormwood,
behind a rusty tractor,
hacked out of a wall of wheat and
midge-clouded bulrushes, weaves
the shortcut I found last month after
hours of head-scratching squinting scrutiny,
seven bony logs
with seven drilled-on steps,
a wooden stretcher across the stream,
fourteen seconds and I’m in the village.
 
There you fizz and bubble,
a curvaceous bottle of nationalist elixir
in a warehouse of globalist poisons.
 
Along the windsurfer-swabbed,
fisherman-stitched lake
hares and weasels and puppies are scampering,
chaffinches are chirruping,
frogs and lizards leap,
wild boar snuffle around.
The Polish for boar is jeeky, you tell me,
same as the word for wild.
So “wild boar” is “jeeky jeeky”.
 
Beside a derelict barn,
down on the daisy-dotted grass
in a haze of honeysuckle,
nature finds its way,
our fingers
then our lips
find each other.
 
The lake-blue eyes
in your maskless face
pour into me
as torrents of sweet hot
medicinal kisses
drench my parched core
melting
two decades
of coughing, sneezing, shivering
winter,
 
and I fancy,
 
somehow,
 
I can see Heaven
or Zeta Reticuli,
 
and God
in a spinning ark,
hovering over a stable.