I.
At twilight, we learn that the first
case of COVID-19 has emerged in our state.
I look to you, an emergency physician, 
light fading from your eyes as you 
look pensively into that fading light,
and T. S. Elliot’s words reverberate in my mind:
“the evening was spread out against the sky, 
like a patient etherized upon a table.”

Weeks later, you leave for work 
at the hospital-turned-cemetery, 
our city a body heaving,
un-etherized.

II.
I know you have returned from work 
when vaporized ethanol fills the air.
You slowly shuffle off your scrubs before showering,
the torrent of hot water failing to palliate
the torrent of guilt washing over – you
raise your arms to your head like the Greek god Atlas,
who bore the weight of the heavens on his shoulders,
except you shoulder the weight of mortal lives,
the memories of their mortality 
etched in immortality in your consciousness.

We go for a walk around 
the neighborhood afterwards:
We are among the many faces
swathed in cloth armor, 
emerging from our dens and
pausing 
to taste the sweet fragrance of 
hibernation’s release and then
darting 
away before our breaths become one, 
our footsteps syncopated by 
abrupt halts, improvised detours, 
allegro cadenzas into the far distance, 
until we are all six feet – or six octaves –apart,
and the cadence of solitude is resumed.


III.
You tell me that pandemic medicine 
is a mathematical algorithm gone askew: 
Viral divisions beget divisions 
that subtract human lives, 
exponentially growing cases 
and exponentially decreasing masks.
Yet pandemic medicine is also 
a spiritual labyrinth of souls 
navigating sleep and eternal sleep. 
You wonder if there is an afterlife or reincarnation, 
mourning how medical training 
prepared you to be a caretaker of the flesh 
but not a guide for the soul.

IV.
You sense your own soul shudder when the symptoms start:
the sandpaper crackle of your throat, 
the heat unduly radiating from your skin, 
the dead weight in the dead space of your lungs. 
You get tested immediately, and we wait, 
our souls siloed in silence, straddling between
sanguine and stunned.

The test returns positive.
You tell me about a dream:  
you’re reincarnated as a swan, 
wings spread open to embrace and protect,
but you’re cursed – tethered to the bodies 
of patients you tried saving in your human life, 
you can’t swim, only sink.
Your words slur from fever dream to Hippocratic oath 
to battle hymn to swan song.

V.
The doctors say that the virus infiltrated and 
unleashed battalions across the terrain of the organs, 
marshalling your sentinels towards death, 
the lymphopenia, multisystemic inflammation – 
these polysyllabic conflagrations continued
unabated.

As dusk falls, I walk alone,
tracing cracks on the sidewalk, 
days after tracing cracks on the ICU windows,
brushing my heel against this chalky earth, 
days after brushing my hand against 
the chalky fabric of your skin,
days after you treaded the border 
between here and the hereafter 
alone before dusk fell.

VI.
On these evening walks, 
I’ve become a “walking shadow” – 
the Bard’s words eclipsing my thoughts.
But on this evening, 
the sound of my name echoing from afar 
illuminates my presence.
I turn to see my neighbor waving hello 
and stretch my hand towards her outstretched hand 
until we remember that a handshake is a hazard 
that could drown us in the River Styx. 
So instead we drown ourselves into 
the oceans of our dilating pupils, 
re-ride the tides of bitter and blissful days, 
and float our way to you.