Plague Diary Excerpts (Part 2 of 2) (Kovacik)

April 20, 2020 

This morning social distancing appeared in my dreams. I was at some sort of party, where, I realized, no one was keeping six feet apart. Two women mentioned they were looking for a place to spend the night, so they wouldn’t have to drive the hour to Bloomington. I thought about volunteering my space, now with two extra bedrooms. But I wondered who these women were and how they’d been living, and if they were “worthy” of being admitted to my house. I believe this is the first true social distancing dream I have had.

That might be because yesterday social distancing began to affect me differently. I cried when watching St. Mary’s virtual Mass, which featured the doubting Thomas Gospel and the disciples huddled in a single locked house.

April 22, 2020

Yesterday I felt a deep sorrow. Taking the files off Jim’s computer was hard—so much careful planning for our many vacations, the poster he made when our cat Socks disappeared, all his drafts of stories and places to submit. I could feel his will there and also his penchant for idiosyncratic organization and tendency to misspell certain words. It was more painful than getting rid of his clothes, which I did within a week of his death. Even when I rewarded myself with a trip to the garden store where I spent over $80 on organic soil and plants, I couldn’t shake my melancholy because Jim loved the garden on the deck. It gave him hope and pleasure to see all that life.

April 23, 2020

Am getting into Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights—he’s a kind of twenty-first-century Pascal or Montaigne. Quirky, talky syntax belies the book’s learnedness. What’s clear is the looseness of style is hard won. After all, it’s Gay who wrote “Ode to the Puritan in Me.” One essayette featured musings on “Negreetings”—acknowledging other Black people in public. Like Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, this book’s delights derive often from anger and grief.

 May 3, 2020

Dream this morn about water leaks coming up through floor and from the ceiling. In real life, after thirty hours of Mark’s fix of the water heater holding, I went downstairs yesterday eve to see water cascading from the appliance. I turned off the valve to it, and texted a pic to Mark. He suggested I take a shower, so I did, which prompted more waterfall. That part of the basement is absolutely gross what with the paint cans lined up on the floor that got wet and will now rust.

I also painted the closet in Jim’s former study, now a bedroom where my niece Carrie will stay. My approach was strictly Potemkin village—the aim less thoroughness than the appearance of cleanliness. To achieve the former, I would have had to buy spackle and drag in the tall ladder from the garage to fix a hole in the ceiling.

May 11, 2020

Carrie arrived yesterday around 3:30. As with every Kovacik, she did not travel light. Brought volleyball, yoga mat, Keebler’s fudge cookies, and, of course, clothes and stuffed animals. I tried not to be a psycho Crusoe type, desperate to talk to a live human. But it was delightful to eat with her. Made spinach lasagna, fruit salad, and watermelon mojitos with Babkallah for dessert.

May 17, 2020

Yesterday we had virtual commencement on Zoom. I donned regalia, including the homemade mortarboard that Susan had sewn. Carrie S had masterminded the whole thing with an opening slideshow of photos of the graduating seniors, set to “Pomp & Circumstance” and then lovely opening remarks by our chair David H that referred to the Inferno—Dante needing to pass through fire to become more truly himself. Marilee cried four times, I once. Various other people and I mentioned our habit of spritzing on perfume before Zooming.

May 22, 2020

This morning I drove to campus for the first time since March. The parking lot contained no more than five cars, and I had to use the magnetized strip on my ID to get into my building. When I arrived at the fifth floor, I went to the copy room to steal two reams of paper. After all, no one will be needing it any time soon. As I walked the quiet corridor, I thought of Pompeii, the door decorations unchanging for months. Mine still had the Valentines that students and colleagues had affixed to it two weeks after Jim’s death. The bin on my door still held the International Women’s Day flyers photocopied just before the event was cancelled. And my calendar was, of course, still on March. I thought of Miss Havisham: clocks stopped, a way of life unexpectedly ended.

May 24, 2020

A prickle of anxiety about Jim’s grave: did I order a headstone? And today I found out the truth: no, I did not. Nearly four months after his death, his grave is anonymous. I’m deeply ashamed that today was the first I even went to the cemetery and that I overlooked this most intimate task. Plus I overdrew my checking account. Just generally feel like a fuckup. My hair is grizzled and curly after three months of self-barbering.

May 26, 2020

Carrie said her professors urged pharmacy students to keep diaries of the COVID era because job interviewers would require them to account for how they managed, reacted.

June 2, 2020

Last night, Trump essentially declared martial law on his own people because of multiple nights of people protesting the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as a couple of other prominent killings, either by police or armed citizens. People are risking their lives in this pandemic to fight for justice. Somehow the racist rhetoric and actions of the Trump presidency intersect in a malign way with the epidemic and this police brutality. Peaceful protests such as Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the anthem at ball games Trump and corporate types disdained. Destruction of all-holy property under capitalism is all that gets their attention.

Karen Kovacik authored the poetry collections Metropolis Burning and Beyond the Velvet Curtain. Her work as a poet and translator has received numerous honors, including the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in literary translation. She’s the translator most recently of Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture, a finalist for the 2019 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the editor of the anthology of Polish women poets, Scattering the Dark. Professor of English at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, she served as Indiana’s Poet Laureate from 2012-2014.