BODY HEAT

LINDY HOUGH

The state of California is in quarantine.

Shelter-at-home feels like house arrest.

If you have your mask on a walk,

that’s good enough, don’t need to wear it. But

that stymies the point of a mask: to shield others

from your unintentional flying droplets

and be shielded from others’ trajectories.

Encountering a pedestrian

I take big half circles

into the street, hardly any cars anyway,

greeting strangers warmly, if shyly.

I relate to people walking home

from Berkeley much more than

before the pandemic.

How did it start?

At first we thought someone

ate a bat carrying the virus

in Wuhan, China.

But that ends up blaming China.

Blame is not the same as

fact: I can state fact w/o meaning

blame. Is that not true? There’s been

no other received explanation.

We have good intel on this.

POTUS blames China. He takes a smidgen of fact

and twists it to suggest he discovered this,

a dagger to hurt, in this case a country.

We know from the SARS virus that the coronavirus

originates in bats. The only mammal adapted for

flight. A bat’s body temperature soars

to 108°F while flying, its tiny heart thumps

like fast staccato, rising to 1,000 beats per minute.

Bats are creatures with very sharp teeth who

come out only at night, seeing by sound.

Eating dinner outdoors, my family

used to watch bats at dusk,

recognizing them as different from

birds by their jagged prowl.

The balance of their hot body and

fast heartbeat gives bats an ideal internal

climate, providing a defensive

tolerance for viruses living in them

peacefully.

It’s not bats. It’s what we do with bats

that loads this pandemic risk.

And what do we do? We eat them raw.

Did a SuperCarrier catch

COVID-19 from eating a raw

bat? How many people and how many bats?

Many diseased carrier bats? Or was just one

bat with the virus biting one person

enough to cause this?

What will we learn from this?

Impermanence. Yes, everything changes.

Dragonflies. Monarch butterflies. Milkweed.

LINDY HOUGH is a poet and fiction writer. She is the author of five books of poetry: Changing Woman, Psyche, The Sun in Cancer, Outlands & Inlands, and Wild Horses, Wild Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1971–2010. She has completed a novel about a Denver family during the uranium boom in the Four Corners area in the early 1950s. She lives in Berkeley, California, and Portland, Maine. www.lindyhough.com.