Tonight in my local poetry workshop (via zoom, of course), a few poets shared prose poems or poems that reminded us all of journal entries. They were solid pieces - I don't mean to belittle them in any way by making the comparison. But it was interesting.
It was also interesting how many common themes or images we, as a group, seem to be presenting. I've seen this happen before in other poetry groups, and it feels like a sort of collective consciousness at work. This week, there are dogs in the poems. That week, crows. Now the branches of trees. Now cars, now playing with time. With music. Who knows how synchronicity works? I find it fascinating, regardless.
We had rain today, and yesterday, another death in the county, bringing the total to four and, I think, pushing out the return-to-normal (or whatever "normal" will be) timeline that much further. The Johns Hopkins site lists 4.1 million reported cases, over 80,000 deaths in the U.S. More worrisome, to me, are the cases of children showing symptoms of something like Kawasaki diseases related to covid19. That kind of thing - side effects, mutations - could really launch one into a panic. On the other hand, more and more people seem to be wanting to congregate. What? Why? asks the introvert who read post-apocalyptic fiction as a child...
On a completely different note, although related to Mother's Day, I recently started to go through a box of old toys and dolls from my childhood, D's childhood, and from the recently-departed childhood of our own kids. One of the things I found, in triplicate, was a stuffed dog with jingle bells in its ears that was my first stuffed animal, whom I called "ba-ba." Maybe it was a dog and I thought it was a lamb. But then again, the greyhound and whippet-type strays we owned when I was little were called "Rabbit" and "Bambi," so it might not be surprising if I was a little confused about which animals were which. This photo shows the horrifying progression of decay from what must have been the first iteration (unless this was something my mother or brothers owned) to the last (which was undoubtedly my sister's but not as well...loved...by her as it must have been by me). The note on the red edition was penned by my mother.
I documented them with the camera and thanked them and let them go. Perhaps when my poetry group meets next, skin horses will appear in the stanzas.
There is a longer story behind all this, but the short version is that while this vehicle, which D. purchased for $1, was fun while it lasted, it had become an albatross that D. c/would not deal with when it came time to smog it for registration. We played chicken once for two years, then I had it fixed and it was greatly enjoyed again for a while, and then it sat, un-smogged, again for nearly two years. He didn't want to fix it up enough to sell it and he didn't want to fix it up to keep it. We donated it. And while D. no doubt felt some sadness at seeing it go, it was only his insisting that it had to go that prompted the donation. The week before it left, he told me he felt absolutely nothing about it going away. The day before it left, he admitted that he was a little sorry to see it go. But he agreed with his coworker, who had said, "In two years, you're not going to say, gosh, I sure wish I still had that car sitting under a tarp in my driveway." 
