From the Anthology
Pandemic Reflections: Five Years Later
I opened, and then closed an art
gallery, my dream business just
couldn’t survive no visitors, little sales.
But I held it afloat for several years
building frames, doing side projects
that led to purchasing a vacant property
and spending another fourteen months
renovating it alone into a home again
with open floor plans, hardwood floors
a walk-in shower, a new two-car
garage, all built with carpal-tunnel
hands and swollen knees, through two bouts
of pneumonia, one leaving me
hospitalized with blood clots
in my lungs. Still the stars still come
out at night, and last month the planets
all lined up among them, and
on a magical spring afternoon
a year ago the moon swung in front
of the sun, and a circle of faint
twilight lay on the horizon while
we sat in total darkness. Brown bats
fell from their crevices in the shaggy
broken trees and encircled me for
several minutes. I will never
forget the coolness of the air
and the quiet at midday.
The birds still pass through
the yard on their way to and from
the Appalachian mountains and Canadian
Shield, my son finished his studies
in architecture, and we worked two
summers in construction together.
I’ve always wanted to build with him
and we did–– a maple stair rail, laid
tongue & groove flooring, he drew the plans
for the garage. The city inspector
said it had been a long time since
he’d seen a garage so well-built.
This is what a father & son
can do together. And there were five
years of honey harvests, and five
blackberry pickings from the vines
out back, and the lake froze this year
when it hasn’t for the past three.
And last fall we did the impossible
walking the streets of Florence
and Venice as a tourist family
doing tourist things, eating gelatos
having wine with lunch, and we came
back to an impossible election
and a disgraced insurrectionist
and sexual offender as president
all because we were afraid
of strong Black women, or migrants
eating cats and dogs, a selfish
want for cheap gas and eggs
maybe in that order, who knows?
And in a few short months
the government has been dismantled
and park rangers and health researchers
and foreign aid workers have all lost
their jobs and the economy
continues to tumble on the see-saw
whims of tariffs and other
incompetencies, all avoidable,
self-inflicted by one man,
same man in year five when
he bungled the pandemic
response before leaving
millions to die, mobile morgues
in the streets of New York, my
artist friends scarred by this
sight for the rest of their lives
having to explain the horror
to their kids. The unexplainable,
that is what we’ve learned,
we have learned to explain
away the unfathomable.
And yet the leaves are starting
to appear on the lilac tree by
the drive. And the small flower
clusters are forming, and in two
weeks or so it will bloom and smell
like grandmother’s perfume, so strong
the nectar that Baltimore Orioles
will once again clamor through
the branches, sipping this foreign
liqueur, singing in my bedroom window
and I’ll have forgotten how much
the paltry pension fund has lost,
my son will be home for the summer
looking for work, maybe we’ll
build something again and come
home to dinner together, and sit down
and eat a fine meal with the radio on
telling us the latest insanity.
And we’ll half ignore it because
we’re bone-tired, almost too
tired to take a walk to the lake,
but we will follow the low sun
making its arc to the water,
we’ll say hello to neighbors
who’ve also come to watch
and they’ll ask my son
about his plans and he’ll
shrug and say something
to get them to stop asking
because he doesn’t know,
none of us do, where
this is all headed.
Michael Loderstedt's debut book of poetry Why We Fished (published by Redhawk) received the UK Poetry Book Award’s Silver Award in 2023. Other recent poems have recently been published in the NC Literary Review (receiving the James Applewhite Prize in 2021), Muleskinner Review, the Naugatuck River Review, Bangalore Review, Kakalak, Pinesong, and in recent anthologies Light Enters the Grove, Neighborhood Voices, and Poem for Cleveland. Michael received an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Literature in 2020.
