Kaveh Afrasiabi | + Follow Poet |
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Sojourn

He's in self-isolation keeping company
a rooftop crow reminding him
a wiser authority is still at work!
No sense of distance within four walls
sickroom alien, where dawn comes early
and long night falls.
He's lost track of time, the pilgrim soul in him
finds no harbor to anchor, plays monopoly with
his mind, thinking of Galileo: “the larger the machine, the greater its weakness.”
Conjures a theory of “Chinese virus” as spirit wrapped in embryo waiting for the opportune moment
to rule the world, a living locked in its own order by
the magnitude of its destruction, clearly one cannot grant an invisible giant
the same proportion of limbs as an ordinary enemy.
Push up, stretch, and climbing up and down the stairs,
he calculates the rate of death as the speed by which
life is saved, it's always good to spin the positive, and
he thinks of the virus as a snow emergency using old shovels
to deal with it, or a bowline knot that comes untied with ease
on a fisherman's boat in wild, boisterous ocean, and then his mind
conjures the word “cross-mutation,” readaptation of an idea
from one artifact to another, now wondering if the virus has come from
outer orbits or is a cell phone disease, or the tree of life re-enacting
an old theme, full of words such as tension, compression, torsion, shear, bending, and
destruction, but then again he thinks of it as a material form, in need of cutting, hammering, grasping, scraping, splitting, piercing, re-shaping, and measuring. 

And time passes and suddenly, he is in company with god,
that drops by late hours to check up on him, reminding him with
genuine equanimity, nature is capable of designing traces of extraordinary
polarization.  

We are on sojourn
myself and I, breaking the monopoly of 
his mind.

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