Sunday, March 22, 2020

Let’s watch a movie about gay dancers in Soviet Georgia.
Let’s read poems about ghosts and writing our names with stones.
Let’s give our niece a FaceTime tour of our overgrown backyard.

Saturday, March 21, 2020

After finishing a William Saroyan story about love, I am stunned by the sight of the back of my own hand,
dry, wrinkled, deeply crevassed, skin no longer taut. I marvel at the aging of my 46-year-old body.
We walk the dog to the park and I see two empty, discarded Lysol cans at the foot of a giant pine.

I hold the leash loosely as the dog plays hide-and-seek with my wife, around and around the rock pile.
In the nearby baseball field, a terrible pitcher pitches a bucketful of lime green softballs to a portly batter
as five outfielders spread out so far into the adjacent ballfields that it’s impossible to mark the distance.

Friday, March 20, 2020

Working at home together for three days, my wife has started calling me her “colleague” in zoom meetings.
For a mid-afternoon break, we walk the dog outside, cross the street to Cary Park, and he goes potty.
Everything is so quiet. The mall has closed, nonessential. I realize: My wife is the only person I can hug.

Thursday, March 19, 2020

Write three lines per day, minimum, says the U.S. Young People’s Poet Laureate.
We are talking via Zoom videoconference; she’s in San Antonio, Texas, and I’m in Fresno.
In thirty days, you’ll have ninety lines. Then she declares: It can change your life!

Wednesday, March 18, 2020

The slider door is open and I can hear the neighbor kids playing in their backyard.
Everything outside is so quiet at 3 PM; their laughing feels amplified, unreal.
Plink! A whiffleball launches over the fence and it lands under our nectarine tree.