Covid Blues: A Review
by Sparrow
There are moments where it looks like the New York City might really die. In 1975, when it went bankrupt. In 2001, when a neofascist president or Saudi “terrorists“ – take your pick – destroyed its two tallest buildings. And, recently, during the coronavirus pandemic. no masks, no talk: corona poems 2020-2021 (Autonomedia) is Eve Packer’s diary-like report from Manhattan during the first year and a half of the virus, when, according to the New York Times, 450,000 New Yorkers left the city. (Weirdly, Tthat’s only 5% of NYC’s population.)
Even as most everyone quarantined, a few courageous souls ventured into the street. From “5.1.20: 3:04 pm:”
not a plane in sight
says the older man
in long european army green trench-
coat, pink face mask –
& he’s right
Across from this poem is a photo of the planeless sky, a minuscule Statue of Liberty alert beneath a thick white cloudbank. (Eve’s photographs illustrate the book.)
Within your neighborhood, you have private jokes with yourself. Eve shares some of hers. Two matching construction cranes next to the Hudson, tilting at the same angle, resemble loping giraffes. They appear in four poems, and one explicatory photograph. For example (from “4.14.20: 8:22 pm”):
my celestial giraffes
have all but dis-
appeared in the fog
but their red neon star noses
tossing blinks
back and forth —
Of course, actual giraffes do live in New York City, in at least one zoo, but these are dream-giraffes, incarnated by a poet’s eyes.
One had a sense during the pandemic that the whole society was moving backwards in time. Eve mused that her life now…
is more like our, my grandma’s:
they did not go to the gym – they spent
almost the entire day in the house:
she got up, probably made breakfast,
certainly coffee dunking in her sugar
cube, adding milk – maybe she did
a day shop –
no refrigerator, just an icebox –
[From “3.25.20: 6:20 pm: grandma.”]
(During March, 2020, New York City had one-third of the reported Covid cases in the nation!)
One way the city speaks is through the voices of its Ancestors. Eve has a ritual of visiting the house James Baldwin lived in, four blocks from her apartment:
every day since this began, i sit on james baldwin’s
former stoop at 81 horatio and wait
for his word.
(I like the use of “word” in the singular – almost like in the sense of the Bible being “God’s word.”) (And of course Baldwin began as a streetcorner preacher.)
When the city closes down, it’s like a lover has walked away. One is left on one’s own, to one’s personal consolations. Eve enjoys combining Passover food with vodka:
as i munch on streits matzoh
w/golds horseradish, sip on
smirnov & tropicana
(from “4.11.20: 7:26 pm.”)
(Her main consolation, swimming, became impossible when the city pools were shut down as sources of infection.)
As the pandemic wears on, people come out of hiding. The random snatches of conversation one hears on every street are like mystical prophecies: the Tarot of urban life. This is especially true if you hear the same phrase twice within a short time:
the pony-tail blonde, they are all pony-tail blondes
saying into her i presume iphone:
i’m having trouble getting motivated, &
jeff, across the street, saying the same
a few minutes ago
And of course Jeff and the pony-tail woman are unmotivated! It’s April 29, 2021, the pandemic has dragged on for over a year, with no clear end in sight. (Incidentally, I have been in Eve’s neighborhood a lot lately, and there really are a colossal number of blondes.)
The book’s subtitle, corona poems, comes from a bunch of kids playing together on 14th St. [3.20.2020: 6:34 pm”]:
one of the girls
in bright yellow wool cap, calling to all,
let’s get corona, let’s get corona, and one
by one, they hold each other
in tight embrace –
New York is a city of insistent surprises: big shocks and small comedies. Eve stumbles into a socially-distanced wedding at Abington Square Park “under the doughboy statue.“ Eve observes the finale:
“i now pronounce you man & wife,”
& the kiss — witnessed only by
the family, and the park-sitters,
the pigeons I guess
[From “5.29.20: 4:29 pm.”] Some moments in the city make you almost cry.
Perhaps the rarest of sights in New York is a warm-hearted cop:
you are about to open the (A-C-E) emergency exit
for the (unmasked) homeless man when
you hear him (quick pulling up his red & white bandanna)
shout:
hey sarge & the officer lets the man
in
[from “2. 28. 21: 5:19 pm: and the rain”]
Eve grew up in the Bronx. I asked about her origins in an email, and she wrote back:
I am from what is now called 'morrisania.' it didn’t have a name then.
i call it the civil war district--cause the streets are mclellan, sherman, sheridan, grant--
In her youth, every artist dreamed of moving to lower Manhattan. Now she resides in the West Village, and though it’s no longer a bohemian enclave, one senses that she’s still thrilled by its radiant history.
The spiritual center of no mask no talk is “6.1.20: 7:50 pm” (which I notice Eve often reads aloud):
sunny, no humidity, a breeze
& at 5 pm a protest at
sheridan square: peaceful,
small scale, packed, the focus:
gay & trans people of
color: before the reading
of the names: the last speaker
says: We all belong
here if it takes
them forever to
figure that shit out
fuck them.
We all belong here. This is the truth of New York City. The city opens its arms to everyone. (And profanity, of course, is a key intensifier in the NYC dialect.) That poem written underneath the Statue of Liberty – by an immigrant! – may not be true for the US (any longer), but it’s still our anthem:
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.
No Mask, No Talk: Corona Poems,
2020-2021
by Eve Packer
Autonomedia Press
$11.95