8 The Meadow And if the world isn’t burning, it’s burning. Fourteen days in quarantine, and my love and I have danced, each night, in the living room—slowly, of course, for the bones ache and the fevers come, the dry cough that scares us half to madness. But we’re well, we say—even the ghosts inside us—and anyway the heart is impenetrable, isn’t it, clothed in gold like the Pope who knelt himself in a ring of fire, in the days of faith, the better to be kept from Heaven’s judgment? The fleas went up in flames, and he stayed down with the living. Living room, we say, and isn’t that all we ask for, these days, some space to tend our souls and keep our peace, some space to lean back, by evening, with that forbidden cigarette, to close our eyes as the brook beside us babbles poems and the lords of money do their best to do death’s will? Seven times we haven’t watched The Seventh Seal, Bergmann’s hymn to this world, not the other, not to see Lines Written in a Time of Pandemic Joseph Fasano
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