Corona     In the beginning it was just a word — some kind of bug, a blip in the news, another ambient danger, like murder and bad service and diaper rash — the dues for being alive, one more thing to think about. It began to cover the sun and we said this isn’t happening, sinking into the sea isn’t happening, none of this is real, unpredicted eclipses cannot occur, we will not allow it. Then all at once night fell — time was stripped of meaning, birds stopped singing in a cloudy starless sky. No hint of dawn. We must have failed to see this coming, most of us.     We failed to see it coming, most of us, because we never thought about the plague or pestilence — antique notions we must have forgotten. Now the enemy flag flies everywhere, unseen, and we obey or we disobey, and we calculate: Who has it? Who is a vector? What have they touched, breathed on? Everything we thought we knew was wrong, delusional, a dream of climbing an endless staircase made of sand. Light infected with darkness and mistrust, time turned viscous, like glue. A starless night, silence. We long to tell ourselves: Spring came so late this year, but it came all the same.     Spring came so late, but it came all the same — we willed it to mean what it always means: life! And the flowers still bloomed, and the names we gave ourselves were names from what we’d been before. We want our freedom! What was our freedom? So hard to remember — forgetting comes so easily now, and the power of the sun drives away common sense. Let’s pretend — it never happened. And that cough? We never heard it. Even Jesus stumbled — but then he got up! If we ignore it, it’s gone, vanquished, and if time is off its moorings, even old quarrels are something to cling to. Anything from before.     Cling to anything from before — what else do we know? The way we touched when our faces were unmasked, unmistakable, wellsprings of love, or the way we moved with grace, determined and unafraid. We remember dance floors, handshakes, running with the crowd, packing the house, gathering and assembling, forming congresses and choirs, and the loudest voices sang in harmony, made sense of suffering, made sense. Now we don’t play music together. All our monuments are broken, and masks are the price we pay for breathing, venturing out. We were wrong about so much. We were masked all along.     We were masked all along, and it took wearing masks to know that. Now we look like what we always were — midwives and bandits, care givers and surgeons, sneak thieves, desperadoes. Who doesn’t love a costume — we’d all die of shame if our souls were bare! Today, let’s write a tragedy, featuring pallbearers with masks made of smoke, a few playboys with masks made of wasps, and in the last scene we wear masks of love and longing, crimes of passion, spirits with a special spark of life, of danger. Learn your lines. The past is barely prologue, and now it’s show time — as the curtain rises, the house goes dark.     The curtain rises and the house goes dark — suddenly everything goes wrong. We’re all naked, our masks hide nothing. When we call out line! we get silence. We miss our marks, forget our parts, plead with God. Someone coughs. The director flails his arms, useless, impotent to restore the illusion. Scrims descend at random, the actors go off script, a stagehand coughs and whispers, I smell smoke. The players improvise a fan dance, hide our humiliation. Someone yells and is shushed, the director starts to rant about the music, it’s all wrong because singing is forbidden — it always was.     So — singing is now forbidden. It was the thing we loved best in the beforetimes, but now we’re all in this alone. Who doesn’t want to dance again? Is it a crime to make a little whoopee, make some noise, make music in the midst of solitude? We never knew how much we’d miss our voices, the act of shaking hands, sharing food, touching one another. The months unfold without rhythm, without sequence, a fever dream of silence flowing like a herd of deer over a fence. It’s getting cold. We didn’t want this. We couldn’t believe it at first, when it still was just a word.                                                       November 2020     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont November 2020