Joshua Corey's Blog, page 7

Spring evaporated today into overcast skies, mists; but the birds kept plugging away and flecks of sun could be glimpsed at times refracting through window screens. I fall further and further away from what I think of as “the world.” The apartment, our building, a few square blocks, the campus and the lakefront: all I have, all I seem to need. Is it wrong to be so very close to comfortable? Here is the little pot I’ll make coffee in tomorrow, and here is a drawing of that pot. I can’t get the proportions right on the tops of things.

Getting medieval at the drop of a hat in my beautiful bougie town, where I turn from one side of the street to the other to discover indescribably old folks limping together, one with a walker, one with a staff like goddamn Gandalf, both masked. People stand around isolated from one another as protocol dictates, not speaking, waiting for burritos or baked goods or to enter the hardware store. The heart of town that we live so close to, in, sacrificing the pale pleasures of suburban yards, filled now with half-lives only. Sunlight, viscous, benficient, pours over everyone like syrup. 

Masked troupe of birders stalking the university campus as I returned from a morning lake walk, lifting binoculars and long-lensed cameras to the treetops while robins and red-winged blackbirds trilled. Sirens were cresting somewhere not too far off: each species has its song proclaiming here I am, or back off, or someone’s going to emergency / somebody’s going to jail. Thank you, Don Henley, and for this: my love for you will still be strong / after the boys of summer have gone. The songs of youth are never wasted, even or especially when they’re the songs of someone else’s middle age.

The ripeness is all, the ripening of isolation and the bloom of fantasy, giving way once in a great while to something like contact, heading out early on the first morning of May to be dazzled by high blossoms lining streets and crowding courtyards, Chicago itself a kind of flower bobbing on a branch, with its denizens walking their dogs, resembling dogs in the way a mask covers and flattens the jaw and chops of the face. There are moments in which the pandemic achieves something like irrelevance. Homecoming like that of sailors, borne up by the sea of spring.

“Dinner with friends” worried about their kids, the turbid floodwaters of Lake Michigan, the end times that keep not ending. The house is quiet and the world, friends, is calm. Switch off the computer and pick up another screen—the connection that separates is never far away. I tap this out in the kitchen while my wife works and our daughter watches her hundredth episode of Gilmore Girls. The ordinary is distinct from the normal, isn’t it? It’s normal now to always be at home. It’s ordinary to recoil from walls like flesh, in mutual squeamishness. There’s coffee tomorrow. There’s time. 

Rain all night and all day, turning the world outside the window into a gray smear—one truth of the world as it is now in how we see it. I sketch the bedroom window, trying to catch the bleak non-view beyond it, the fact of its bleakness: a wall of white siding, a blank window, and rising above the roofline another more jagged roofline, the brutalist building across Sherman Avenue inhabited it seems mainly by older folks, poor folks, and, on the ground floor, our polling place, where I’ve voted in so many elections. Eliot’s advice: wait without hope.

Small joys edge us toward hysteria, giggling with the friends in our building with whom we’re sheltering, tripping along the sidewalk to Target with masks on, stumbling home as if drunk with needful things—athletic socks, Sharpies, a box of ice cream sandwiches. Hilarity around a jigsaw puzzle in the high night of the third floor; silent now, everyone asleep except me and my glass of Bowmore and the books I pet more than read, for companionship and a link to normalcy, literacy, worlds in abeyance or gone. The semester slouches toward its end, the world too, always beginning. Real life. 

Zoom-zoom all the lifelong day, the calm or anxious or exhausted faces flashing up at me from my screen like fish coming to the surface of a pond, out of habit or hope. Walked in the rain. The face of the lake between squalls seemed every shade of gray and blue, faintest at its penultimate edge before a dark ribbon of crayon lined up the horizon beneath a slow-changing violet sky in which gulls dawdled. The world only seems to be on pause; nature takes its way like fate and has its way with us. The virus is not alive.

A friend from Serbia tells us how during the war, when Belgrade was being bombed, some people left their basements, climbed back up into their high-rise apartment buildings, and as the bombs fell, stood on their balconies to watch streaks of light rippling across the sky and milliseconds later hear the echo of bombs, breaking and killing others, not them, as numbed by war they leaned out, far out over their balconies, to see, and fell, and had to be taken to the hospital for broken limbs, so urgent was their need to behold the fate that had overlooked them.

Drag myself up, out, across, up, down, over the face of the day. Iron and rust. The seam, visible, between inside and outside on the decayed Nissen hut where a friend plants tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini. I’m a weight I deadlift over the day. Chicken sandwich. An hour trying to draw the Art Institute from a photograph—a lurid lion in the foreground glowing pale gray and green. The walls watch me closely. Rain. Crying. I get the news from poems—men dying miserably every day, anyway. And women. Pretending to be something I’m not. Pretending I won’t decay. The day.