An Interlinear Musing on

T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

                           by Deborah Hayden – July 20, 2020

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table

Or a patient intubated on a table.

The wildfire virus is clearing out

The elderly, like dry underbrush.

Update your DNR:

Some choose “do not intubate.”

Let me go on my own, at home.

The eugenics of a virus.

When will it end?

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets

And half-deserted roads and freeways.

The cars, half-gone, the air clear, the sky blue.

Urban to bucolic, quiet. Victory vegetable gardens.

Ask Siri how is the air? She says good—air quality is 18.

Siri, my new friend, tell me a joke. Her jokes are bad.

Everything quantified, the air, the infected, the dead.

Numbers—US and global, hit ghastly plateaus in synch.

(“I had not thought death had undone so many”)

Said  T.S, Eliot in another poem)

The Covid War:

How does it stack up?

U.S. dead in thousands:

Spanish flu--675

Civil War  —  655

WWII — 405

Covid—140 as of today

WWI  -- 116

Viet Nam — 58

Korea —  36

American Revolution  —25

Our boys murdered each other, face to face, in the Civil War.

We killed our former selves in the American Revolution.

Covid is suicide on our own soil.

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells

Those were the days

When we went out together, ate lobster

In a Boston sawdust-floored restaurant.

Union Oyster House--take-out only

Legal Seafood--temporarily closed.

Ghost towns, bold animals roam the streets

So our retreat is: home

Our muttering: a string of voiced thoughts

Shared with the dog.

I am a Lighthouse Keeper in a stormy sea.

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

Shelter in place, stay at home.

When we will make our visit?

And run with overwhelming questions

To friends who say welcome, say come in, eat,

Sit with us, talk face to safe face, even hug.

Now we see people in movies doing all these things,

Ordinary things.

We binge-watch Netflix and see people

Gathering in laughing maskless crowds.

As if from another century in a time called Before.

That which was science fiction is Now.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Online flowers have no scent.

Art has gone digital. Museums closed.

Bouquets to Art at the deYoung,

Zoomed lectures bounce around the world.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes

Last year’s yellow fog, thick haze

From close-by wild fires glazed our lungs and windows.

For a day the worst air quality in the world,

Our first masked N 95 experience.

The virus, the fires.

The earth has a temperature.

Covid gives us fever.

Eyes of the infected should turn red

Send out laser beams of warning.

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet

Our faces, our masks, even visors.

The faces that we no longer meet, forget

Unless by Zoom, angled up or down,

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

The future, a straight shot of black asphalt

Shrouded in grey fog.

Time: July 20, 2020, Day 126 of week 19.

Four months and five days.

Do we dare to count ahead?

Time to murder.

New York dismembers its undercover violent crime unit,

Its illegal gun unit, 600 men and women.

(And so) violent crime stats fly up.

But New York used to be so safe, people say.

Is there not enough death from virus?

Why are so many shooting each other?

Chastised cops stage the Blue Flu

And retire early.

Let them shoot each other.

The ingrates.

Time to murder

Just now the world abacus slid its bloody beads

To over 600,000 Covid dead.

Will there ever be a total?

Will it reach a million? More?

How will we ever declare

The End

And roll the credits

On this tedious, poorly directed,

Apocalyptic home movie.

And get back to employment

Prosperity, human contact.

Or will there be another Great Depression?

Unemployment claims: 42 million, another number.

A virus doesn’t murder.

Not so perhaps those who

Breathe their droplets of poison glitter on others.

Not so

The stupid stupid stupid

Covid parties.

Superspreaders.

Grandma dies.

To murder and create

Create what? Why?

This is the time for it,

On days when Covid Catatonia

Does not leave us staring at a white wall

Without the question, without:

Do I dare?

How many days of isolation is too many?

So many depressed.

Pandemic movies predicted it all

And movies of monsters outside—vampires, zombies,

Or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Who are they? Whose bodies have been taken?

The sticky spikey virus floats in the nose,

Sets up shop and replicates.

Invisible.

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

Salons closed. Barbershops closed.

We chop at our own hair

Long and shaggy with white roots.

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

The universe? No.

Do I dare:

Go to the grocery store, get gas, get the mail.

Frontier woman goes to town for staples.

Yeast and flour to bake bread.

People in the streets stay apart,

In Australia a distance of one kangaroo.

One in a hundred now--

(Seriously, that number has to catch attention)--

Are infected by the round and red thing with sharp spikes,

Wandering unchecked to all organs

Like syphilis used to do.

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

To dress or not?

No collar, no pin,

Covid pajamas late in the day.

What to eat and when?

What to read, what tv,

What email?

Try to walk 10,000 steps—but going where?

What to google? Shall I Doom Scroll?

Decide, revise, reverse,

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons

Under quarantine, under self-imposed house arrest

We measure things.

Obsessed with numbers, infected, dead

Establish routines, toast and tea at 4.

We observe passing time units--

Hours or days or weeks or months or quarters.

And then what? We don’t see

The End.

We observe downward spirals and upward trends

We put an X on each day on a calendar

Like those in prison

With an indeterminate sentence.

At San Quentin the numbers shoot up.

The virus likes the incarcerated.

Is solitary confinement now a perk?

Outside the prison, a Mash unit has 200 beds

Where is Hawkeye, or Radar?

              So how should I presume?

And how should I presume?

And should I then presume?

             And how should I begin?

And should I then presume?

             And how should I begin?

Poor Prufrock’s existential refrain.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

My narrow street is empty.

No smoke. No pipes.

No men leaning out of windows.

The goats that came to eat the dry grass have moved on.

Coyotes screech in the night

Two fat rabbits sit like bookends,

The quail parents skitter across the yard

With twelve babies like little mice,

The dark shadow of a swooping hawk.

A vole pops his head out of his hole.

We stare. He asks:

And should I then presume?

             And how should I begin?

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

I should have been a vole, sliding sightless

Through the dark, silent underground.

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

Nietzsche in his madness, his incarceration, his disease

Asked in a lucid moment:

“Didn’t I once write great books?

Die at the right time, he said, then didn’t.

Who could have thought of

Refrigerated trucks, packed with

The Dead.

I grow old ... I grow old ..

(Biographical aside: Tom: we know

You were twenty-two at Harvard

When you gave us Prufrock . . .)

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

Death in Venice.

Aschenbach ate a poisoned strawberry

And died of the Plague,

So far peaches, strawberries: all safe

We email advice on how much to sanitize.

Do we scrub our peaches, our hands, our hair?

Rub disinfectant or vodka on our cracker boxes?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

Do I dare and do I dare find white flannel pants and

Drive the dog to Limatour Beach,

Wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,

Put paws and feet in the ocean

Feel cold salty water

See a different horizon

And listen for mermaids?

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.