Ellen Goldsmith

Read on The Poets Corner on July 12, 2020.

I Am Now an Understudy

 for the part

I was to play this spring

A flurry of cancellations—

classes              book groups                  dinners                Passover Seder

No entrance to rooms I would have inhabited

Instead, in my house, I move from room to room

straightening as I can’t

the mess of the virus

And what’s under study—how

to stay steady, how

to replace the term for what we’re doing—

physical not social distancing—how

to find pleasure—so much more time for baking and walking—

without eclipsing the dark source

of this new found time. How

to go deeper

into the mystery of time        

taking time          saving time          losing time

And what about the eleventh hour?

I remember the long car rides, how

my parents laughed

when before reaching

the Holland Tunnel, I would ask

Are we there yet?

Whatever’s Offered

As I listen to Beethoven’s late quartets,

I find silence

is not the absence of sound.

Eyes closed. Time vanishes.

The emptiness at low tide,

it too will refill.

Listening, I vow

to take whatever’s offered—

a crack in the wall, the smaller piece of pie.