The poem ”In Quarantine, I Reflect on the Death of Ophelia” by Elisa Gonzales as printed in The New Yorker today:
I wake early and angry, I eat oatmeal with thyme honey,
I call my sister, I call my mother, I call my other sisters, my brothers,
I worry about my feverish lover, I worry about my siblings, jobless now.
I send an ill-advised e-mail, I don’t send an ill-advised tweet.
I’m alone so I’m lonely. That’s what my sister says.
Time to stay indoors, the doctor says, all the doctors say,
but the open window betrays that not everyone’s voice dies to solitude.
Shut up, shut up! the window slams.
Time to embrace the virtues of boredom, the price of happiness again, after.
The window shows men digging a place for survivors of the future, the rich ones.
It will be a condo tower, glass walls for better envy.
They’ve built the frames, I see, around the holes where doors will someday go.
Capitalism! So full of holes and hope.
If I try to remember what it was like, childhood, a period of kudzu
growth that felt like stasis in the white-glazed room where days upon days my father shut me—
if I try, I see the ceiling, that water stain trailing down
like brown Pre-Raphaelite curls, hair of a drowning girl among reeds,
which later I recognized in a painting of a pale drowning Ophelia.
I love alone, I tell my sister. She says, You just want to.
I agree I want the past.
For a magnolia to bloom on a crowded street, all safe in beauty, for I
still love the world, though it drowns
and dies like that girl, avoidably.
A professor once asked, pleased we wouldn’t know,
Who is really responsible for the death of Ophelia?
The answer, he said, ought to feel like we have arrived together
at a skyscraper’s peak, where the inhuman
view reveals in windows and in streets
the small, sick or potentially sick bodies—each one a new array of questions.
The only possible epiphany is that the ending of a thought is never such.
Together. I liked the word in the professor’s mouth.
But if I am alone, and if I am lonely, and if I am not alone in loneliness, and if the everyone
together suffers, and if this everyone suffers and dies by the unguided motion of matter, and if
also by the motion of craven, murderous men, and if also by the motion of money, and if of course
you were always going to die, Ophelia, and if even so your death remains unforgivable,
then what are the questions I should ask? All I have is sleeplessness and rage,
and that’s no answer, it’s not even a thought, though it might not end till my body does,
perhaps not even then, as I can imagine it going on past my ending, and really—
what more suitable ghost could I leave behind? Since I do love the world.
kerryfaler.blog 