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,
with crumbling economies,
with Bill Gates and conspiracies,
with visions of commands
in microchips
in humanity
in chains
(whoever you vote for,
the corporations always get in),
with the two-decade-long
ambulance siren of loneliness
in my stomach
reaching its deafening, debt-enslaved,
workless, publess, conversationless,
polythene-gloved, mask-gagged,
laptop-hypnotised,
auto-ejaculating
howling crescendo
as I shuffled across my cage
of unwashed plates, unfiled documents,
unswept clumps of self-cut hair,
unread books,
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,
the kites and footballs are returning,
step by step the masks and cares are slipping off
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.
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 cheated butcher
the alcoholic maths teacher
the closet-homosexual policeman
the bankrupt hairdresser
the sick doctor
and stopping them
from hanging themselves.

Through the up-thrusting grass
and buttercups and dandelions,
hacked out of a wall of wheat and bulrushes, weaves
the shortcut I found last month after
hours of head-scratching squinting scrutiny,
seven tree-branches
with seven drilled-on steps,
a wooden stretcher across the stream,
fourteen seconds and I’m in town.

There you fizz and bubble,
a curvaceous bottle of nationalist elixir
in a warehouse of liberal poisons.

Beside 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”.

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
beautiful as a valley of European barley
beam into me
as torrents of sweet hot
medicinal kisses
drench my parched core
melting
two decades
of coughing, sneezing, shivering
winter.