Little Edie on Surviving Isolation
A Cento for a Pandemic
-For Sarah
It’s all a question of who you want to stay with.
One needs a house to die in—
a beautiful house!
Mother will die and I’ll have to find another Libra
to live with. Isn’t it terrible mother
isn’t a man? Of course, I’m mad
about animals, but raccoons and cats
become a little bit boring after awhile.
I don’t know. Everybody wants a raccoon
nowadays—the most tame, loving animals.
Of course, everything’s in the attic.
Everything from sloths, otters, badgers,
chipmunks. Aren’t we lucky? The hand of God
struck at the right time. Thank God.
But that’s our one link to reality
in here. I play all the time. You have to do
the same thing every day. We’re breathing
through a mask most of the time.
You have to have a lot of kimonos,
a lot of costume changes. If I had the money,
I’d redecorate every single room.
The Berlin Specimen
“In 1877, another specimen was discovered…known as the ‘Berlin Specimen’…the finest and most complete of all known Archaeopteryx fossils. It has been described as ‘the most important natural history specimen in existence’ because it so clearly demonstrates the evolutionary connection between dinosaurs and birds.”
-panel at the Museum of the Earth, Ithaca, NY
If there’s a saint of transitional species,
let me thank that dinosaur of miracles
for this limened beauty, forever moored
in rock, a bouquet of bones delicate as a magpie’s
but weaponized. Let this fossil be an icon of the in-
between, an ancient proof of the seam between
earth and sky filigreed with three-fingered claws
and bony tail, jawed with hypodermic-needle teeth
and wings like an angel’s. In the fount
of my mother’s belly, my body became a doubled-
over song, arpeggio of our origins: gill-
slitted, tailed, practically finned, as fluvial
as any other being. If we come into the world as such
and a fossil is a door to another world,
how can we not wish to emulate forever
the ripple in the rock that helixes into an other?
