Think, now, whose hand …

(ix)

Think, now, whose hand you would like to hold
for the last time: that of a secret or lost lover,

maybe, whom you always believed you would see
again one day. But now ‘one day’ has arrived.

And ask yourself, why, O why – with roads closed,
planes parked and passenger ships in dock –

you deliberately locked yourself down out of fear,
respect or shyness; why you were not wilder – as loss

upon loss piled up in a makeshift mass grave, dug
by your spade over the years, finality the dreaded find.

Think, now, of the faces you cherished – those
that shadow-gatherers have half-stolen – and recall

the arias in your soul when you filled yourself up
with them, the illuminated initials of each word

of theirs, the cobalts, coppers, golden centres
in their eyes that enchanted yours, the touching often

without touch. Reflect on those stolen moments
of grace; relive them despite your skin hunger.

No longer can you be resigned to carving them into
the ghosts you dwell with. For what of the endearments

not uttered, the lifetimes missed, choices
not taken in countries you could have named

while composing cantos for rivers, new summits
for mountains. Remember, the heart

never ages, even in rags; silences speak in colour.
Yet, in a blink, a second belongs to the past

which dissolves into a dream, impermanence
all you can cling to. So why not collect horizons

on which to write lines of poetry for recitals
in the ether, away from this clumsy-graceful dance

on earth. And think whose hand you would like
to hold one last time, then press softly to your lips.

Many poets have responded to the new coronavirus by exposing their work to it – a healthy and necessary reaction, even if the “Covid poem” and “lockdown poem” risk becoming as commonplace as that milder coronavirus infection, the common cold, and equally short-lived. When I read Patricia McCarthy’s latest collection, a series of 35 poems responding to the virus both directly and more associatively, I realised that what made a good “pandemic poem” was that the associations and the symbolism rang true in a context wider than the pandemic.

The ninth poem in the series is the one that provides the collection’s title, Whose hand would you like to hold … Most of the poems are meditations: this one is distinctive in its use of the imperative, a grammatical choice that buttonholes the reader, while suggesting at the same time another conversation between poet and self. The command, “Think, now, whose hand you would like to hold / for the last time” recalls the fact that many who have died from the virus, died alone, their hands unheld. It’s when the deathbed visitor (or, possibly, its occupant) is a lover, “secret or lost”, that the thought becomes interestingly subversive. The third couplet extends metaphorically the concept of lockdown: it’s not simply a matter of those road closures but of (too much) “fear, / respect or shyness”. I heard here a little echo of that great poem of imperatives, the villanelle by Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night.

Gravedigging seems to become a kind of archaeological dig for the past in stanza five. But “finality” is the only harsh, spade-rasping “find”. Who are the “shadow-gatherers” that have “half-stolen” the faces of the lovers? Not mourners, perhaps, but passing years or cautious social conventions: whatever restrains desire.

As floaters in the inner eye of imagination, the lovers are recalled all the move vividly. Their words, like monks’ manuscripts, begin with an illuminated letter. Their eyes contain magical glints of colour: “cobalts, coppers, golden centres …” Later, the poem declares, “Silences speak in colour.”

In a way, the sad story of the typical Covid patient’s deathbed is reversed: the cruel absences, the not-touching, are transformed by the imaginary touching. The idea of theft repeats: “Reflect on those stolen moments / of grace; relive them despite your skin hunger.” This is not advice to the dying, of course, but the living: the term “skin hunger” brings the animal’s need for touch and the lover’s desire into the same territory. The reader or the poet is asked to explore the “countries you could have named” and, rather than deny regrets, engage with them and redeem them through vision and language. Loss and “impermanence” are inescapable, but memory can be time-resistant: it can restores the past.

I was engaged most of all by the idea of collecting horizons “on which to write lines of poetry for recitals / in the ether, away from this clumsy-graceful dance // on earth.” Although the poem rests finally its restless focus on simple physicality, the pressure of hand and lips, the previous flight of fancy is still in the air. Words uttered, poems recited, generate soundwaves beyond the lifespan and location of their speaker.

Time will sift the necessary Covid poems from the occasional and predictable. The former are poems like this one, which, in spite of the news that helped shape them, take paths through the pandemic into the universal human conditions of love and death.