The Corona Clock

Corona: from the Latin for crown, or garland, or wreath.Corona: a cigar, a city in California, a beer, a sublime (sublimity suggests beauty, yes, but also fear) sun- or moon-nimbus-halo. But, yes, Corona, COVID-19, a pandemic virus prismatically defined (or is it?) in William Heyen’s lyric that ends, as first spoken here before it ramifies, before it mutates, with our “riv- / en heart, love.” We notice his broken end-rhyme. And we share, by way of poem after poem, our condition of what Shakespeare’s Hamlet laments as “The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.” And not just flesh, but the assailed spirit, what Father Hopkins calls “wórld-sorrow.” Wórld-sorrow: this state of being may sometimes be assuaged, as we read, as we listen, as we hear, by our empathy for one another. We share a dis-ease, an anxiety that threatens our sanity and our humanity. By the time we reach Heyen’s sobbing infected title poem “The Corona Clock,” we may come to realize that we need poetry to face our various painful and poignant conditions, to reveal us to ourselves.