Summary

In “Requiem,” “Please,” the speaker asks that people follow social-distancing rules.

In “Arborescent I,” the speaker compares people to trees. When people are forced to distance themselves from one another, they lose their sense of grounding.

In “At First,” the speaker notices how communication changed at the start of the pandemic. People were unsure how to express what they were experiencing. Loneliness created despair. With time, people “began to lose words” for the natural world and particular emotions (10). Once people were able to see one another again, they rediscovered “the rhetoric of reunion” (11).

In “Fugue,” at the start of the pandemic, panic spread through the population. The speaker notes the ways people expressed grief and fear. Images of the past “flickered in / & out” of everyone’s “vision” (13). Life was defined by “disease & disaster” (14). No one...