Quarantine

April 17 2020

(from the Italian quarantina giorni - “space of 40 days”)

Forty days and forty nights

wandering in the wilderness.

Forty days of rain.

Forty years in the desert,

forty weeks to be pregnant,

and forty years

in the reign of kings.

So naturally, the Venetians chose forty days

for quarantine.

Ships cooling at anchor

to clear the air of miasma;

an arbitrary number, perhaps

but hardly a random one.

And in a time of contagion

we are also urged to remain

within our own four walls.

Close quarters

for a fortnight

alone with ourselves.

The reclusive and hermetic

are fully onboard.

The introverts and homebodies

have hardly noticed.

While the monastic and cloistered

have yet to be told.

Only extroverts suffer.

The big personalities

who are envied and admired,

the outgoing and gregarious

who invariably arrive

with a slap on the back

an outstretched hand

and a ready smile.

While I've been preparing for this

all my life.

Not sleeping in a small stone cell

on the cold floor

in unwashed robes.

Not forbidden to talk

or lost in prayer

or renouncing wealth.

But monastic, nevertheless.

A solitary sort

who has been on his own

for much more than 40 years,

and who takes solace

in solitude.

A small vessel

you would hardly notice

anchored far from shore,

drifting in a fitful wind

rocking on the swell.

Where I look out

on the great bustling metropolis

and record my private thoughts.

Where I listen to the lives of strangers
and try to make sense of it;
how sound carries
with surprising clarity
over open water,
especially at night.

As if I were an anthropologist,

nose pressed to the glass

of my one-way mirror.

Or had come from some foreign land,

observant

detached

and often somewhat baffled
by what's happening on shore. 

Or had dropped down

from some other planet

in human form,

a resident alien

who is never quite at home.

A moat

a boat

a man.

A quarantine

that lasts and lasts.

When I started to look into the history of quarantine, I quickly learned what a mystical number “forty” is. In many traditions, but especially the Bible. I hope I didn't go on too long with the references. (Because beginning a poem with tedious lists and long litanies is never a good idea if you want to draw in readers!) Of course, in this time of coronavirus, we're told fourteen days; but that's science, not superstition, and it's the latter that carries the weight of culture and compulsion.

I think I used every variation on the theme, but very intentionally left out the stigmatized one: “loner”. Although frankly, I think it's the word that describes me best, and is the most honest. But I dislike its unavoidable connotation: the loner as axe-murdering psychopath. And with these physical distancing and self-isolation measures, that truth is that my essential lifestyle has hardly changed. (That is, if you think “lifestyle” isn't too grandiloquent a word to describe what I do!)

In this poem the original practice of quarantine – a ship anchored offshore – becomes a convenient metaphor for a loner like me. That was the part I most enjoyed writing, and it was my stumbling into it that actually rescued the poem – after numerous false starts – from being unceremoniously chucked in the nearest wastebasket. (Which is also a convenient metaphor, since these days I've taken to writing directly on the computer: the keyboard, instead of my traditional habit of pen on blank white paper.)