Daze of
Radical Melancholy

(for Jim Kelly)

Sunday mornings are

for staring into space.

Days now feel

derived from the dreams

of an unreliable narrator.

Nights, less fatalistic.

An autistic friend

says that Tuesday’s full moon

should slow down

the death rate from the virus.

When I ask where he’d heard that,

he said “it was on the news”.

Maybe autism is

the new magical thinking.

These days
I can no longer attribute 

what I say or think 

as coming from

inside myself.

I'm letting the virus
change me.
I'm letting go

of my fear of being the fool.

Truth is, I only want to be true.

In my short play “STRAW”

a scarecrow pleads with a man

to trade places with him

because the very thought 

of a windswept field

makes him want to weep.

Like him I live with a memory 

of inaccessible beauty,

a holy thing

that cannot be erased.

Tormented by the things

I find beautiful,

I put on the ragged

hand-me-downs of fate.

This morning, the discovery of

 a tear stain on the mirror

has convinced me 

of the sadness 

of my own reflection,

regardless whether
they are mine or his.
Apart from our living
in identical rooms,
my life is still my own.

On Palm Sunday

the line to enter the local Walmart

was two blocks long at 7:15 AM.

Everyone wore face masks,
a winding haphazard caravan
of empty shopping carts,

the shoppers palms
anxiously clutching 

the chilly metal bars
as they wound past
the $9.95 flower pots
with their purple promise
of early Easter.

Even as the deaths
are now reported

only by the numbers

as if dying were

a grotesque calamity,

the less said the better,

I say death is beautiful

no matter how it arrives,

sacred like anything

one of a kind;

the one true thing

one can own.

And then you died
helping another neighbor
and my broken heart
sprouted the first
true crocus
of everlasting Spring.

Peter Valentyne

April 2020 in the time of Corona