It’s embarrassing to admit: for me, the search for a COVID vaccine has turned into a competition against friends, acquaintances, and neighbors. When I hear that so-and-so has gotten the vaccine or has an appointment soon, instead of being happy for them—for all of us—I’m jealous, even resentful. Of course, I think, they would have the inside information, of course they would know the secret number to call, of course they would drive to any county at any hour of the day, of course they would be the favored friend of the mutual friend who volunteers to give the shots and texts them a little before 5 p.m. telling them to race to the health department because there are a few doses leftover that need to be used before the end of day.
My wife has been trying everything to get us appointments: consulting with friends, obsessively scrolling through posts on Nextdoor for tips, adding our names to waitlists, calling neighboring counties and remaining on hold for hours in the hopes of lucking out and speaking with a helpful person who will tell her, at last, your appointments are on….
And now yet another Facebook post of a rolled-up sleeve, exposed shoulder with Band-Aid, cheerful sticker displayed proudly on a chest saying I got mine! Enough! I can’t take another insult to my competence—me, the one who doesn’t know how the system works and how to get it to work for me.
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“It was good to be in Chicago.”
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Yes, it was. A little more than a year ago in January, I spent a few days participating in a focus group hosted by the Interfaith Youth Core with educators and administrators, at which we explored ways of integrating interfaith education into core curricula at colleges and universities throughout the United States.
It was cold. It snowed, delaying the return flights of many of the participants. I had already planned to stay a few extra days—freedom to wander what has become, over the past couple of years, one of my favorite cities: the Art Institute, Wacker Drive along the river, the architecture, the lake….
It was good to be in Chicago.
For almost a year now I’ve been stuck in Asheville—a good place, for which I’m grateful—but stuck nonetheless. No Chicago, no Andalusia (we had planned a month-long trip this past fall to Spain and Portugal), not even a road trip up to the Northeast to see my 93-year-old father and 89-year-old mother and my step-daughter and her two lively young boys. Stuck but not helpless, not trapped with no apparent way out, which is how I’ve felt seeing others get their vaccines while I keep being blocked—locked out of paradise or at least the relief of knowing that I’m somewhat protected and somewhat freer to move about.
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“It was good to be in Chicago.”
What comes next? How about this: “On the way to Santiago.”
That’s Kenneth Koch in Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry. He’s demonstrating how one line of a poem leads to another.
Here’s another possibility:
It was good to be in Chicago
Five hundred years ago.
Notice how the first line offers the possibility of at least two different next lines, in this case both inspired by the desire to make a little music.
As Koch goes on to demonstrate, these are hardly the only two possibilities.
It was good to be in Chicago
But bad to be in New York.
This example, expressing contrast (good/bad; Chicago/New York) creates expectations of a poem that will move in an entirely different direction than that suggested by “It was good to be in Chicago / Five hundred years ago.”
“[A poem] finds its own name as it goes,” writes Robert Frost in “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Why should one assume that the direction suggested by one version of a second line will lead a poem to the discovery of its true name?
Consider these other possibilities offered by Koch:
It was good to be in Chicago
In the wind
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It was good to be in Chicago
With its lake and its wind
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It was good to be in Chicago
With you. It was cold.
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It was good to be in Chicago
At the time of the embargo
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It was good to be in Chicago
And to go to the Field Museum
And to read the Chicago Tribune
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It was good to be in Chicago
For the first time…
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It was good to be in Chicago
On the way to Santiago
It was good to understand
On the way to being ignorant again
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It was good to be in Chicago
On the way to Santiago
With its rock wall of mountains
And its gardens high above streets
That are rocketing with bone-colored taxis
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So many possibilities!
I see only two: you get yours, or I get mine.
How did I come to such a limited sense of what’s possible? So many contributing factors: biological, psychological, familial, cultural, economic, racial, political….
I seem to have little or no control over the vaccine situation. We’re now on a waitlist in our home county. I’m number 3,896. My wife is number 6,732. We signed up at the same time. How are our numbers so far apart? Will we get an appointment next week? The week after? In two weeks? Three? Four? No one knows how the system works, though our “neighbors” on Nextdoor all claim to.
The uncertainty, anxiety, and fear narrow my view of what’s possible.
How to widen it?
Poetry, writing and reading it. Line by line, which is how I read poems and encourage my students to read them. Freedom’s there, at the end of a line, end-stopped or enjambed, before the arrival of the next line. There where, if not everything, then many things are possible.
“I dwell in Possibility–”
So writes Emily Dickinson. What comes next? If you know the poem, try to forget it. Listen to the language. Allow yourself to discover the many possibilities of what could come next. This is your chance to cultivate a sense of freedom.
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My wife and I have now received our first shots. We’re relieved. I am no longer jealous of all those in my small world who received the vaccine before me. But I know how easily I could be turned against them and others again. (Not that they’d know it. I am strong enough not to act on these dark, conditioned feelings.)
But I want to do what I can to cultivate another way of seeing and being in the world, especially in trying times. So I will read—and write—poems, line by line by line, trusting that if I do, in time, whether I’m in Asheville, Cordoba, or Chicago, I’ll be “spreading wide my Narrow hands / To gather Paradise—”
Richard Chess directed the Center for Jewish Studies at UNC Asheville for 30 years. He helps lead UNC Asheville’s contemplative inquiry initiative. He is a board member for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. He’s published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. You can find him at http://www.richardchess.com
