The Worrying

For this week’s Peace of History: 
For National Poetry Month, we will be sharing poems to reflect on our own current moment. Today we share a poem from the HIV/AIDS crisis. To those who are feeling helpless and anxious, to those who are worried about their own vulnerability to covid-19, or the vulnerability of a loved one, this is for you. And yet we must remember that Paul Monette, who wrote this poem about his own HIV+ partner, must have felt so much more alone than most of us do. With the near-universal spread of covid-19, most of us are going through the common experience of quarantining at home. In addition, we are able to connect with each other remotely through social media and other technology to extents impossible in the 1980s. Let us read Paul’s words and, for a moment, feel his anxiety and isolation as our own -- but then remember that we are not alone. We are all in this together. 

THE WORRYING

ate me alive day and night these land mines
all over like the toy bombs dropped on the
Afghans little Bozo jack-in-the-boxes
that blow your hands off 3 A.M. I’d go
around the house with a rag of ammonia 
wiping wiping crazed as a housewife on Let’s
Make a Deal the deal being PLEASE DON’T MAKE
HIM SICK AGAIN faucets doorknobs the phone
every lethal thing a person grips and leaves
his prints on scrubbed my hands till my fingers
cracked washed apples ten times ten no salad but
iceberg and shuck the outer two thirds someone
we knew was brain dead from sushi so stick
to meatloaf creamed corn spuds whatever we
could cook to death DON’T USE THE D WORD
EVEN IN JEST when you started craving deli
I heaved a sigh because salami was so de-
germed with its lovely nitrites to hell with 
cholesterol that’s for people way way over
the hill or up the hill not us in the vale
of borrowed time yet I was so far more gone
than you nuts in fact ruinous as a supermom
with a kid in a bubble who can’t play and ten
years later can’t work can’t kiss can’t laugh
but his room’s still clean every cough every
bump would nothing ever be nothing again
cramming you with zinc and Haagen-Dazs so wild
to fatten you up I couldn’t keep track of
what was medicine what was old wives’ but see
THERE WAS NO MEDICINE only me and to 
circle the wagons and island the last of our 
magic spoon by spoon nap by nap till we
healed you as April heals drinking the sun 
I was Prospero of the spell of day-by-day
and all of this just the house worry peanuts
to what’s out there and you with the dagger at
your jugular struggling back to work jotting
your calendar two months ahead penciling
clients husbanding husbanding inching back
and me agape with the day’s demises who 
was swollen who gone mad ringing you on
the hour how are you compared to ten noon
one come home and have blintzes petrified
you’d step in an elevator with some hacking
CPA the whole world ought to be masked 
please I can’t even speak of the hospital fear
firsts bone white the first day of an assault 
huddled by your bed like an old crone empty-
eyed in a Greek square black on black the waiting
for tests the chamber of horrors in my head
my rags and vitamins dumb as leeches how did
the meningitis get in where did I slip up
what didn’t I scour I’d have swathed the city
in gauze to cushion you no man who hasn’t 
watched his cruelest worry come true in a room
with no door can ever know what doesn’t 
die because they lie who say it’s over
Rog it hasn’t stopped at all are you okay
does it hurt what can I do still still I
think if I worry enough I’ll keep you near
the night before Thanksgiving I had this
panic to buy the plot on either side of us
so we won’t be cramped that yard of extra grass 
would let us breathe THIS IS CRAZY RIGHT but
Thanksgiving morning I went the grave two over 
beside you was six feet deep ready for the next 
murdered dream so see the threat was real
why not worry worry is like prayer is like
God if you have none they all forget there’s 
the other side too twelve years and not once
to fret WHO WILL EVER LOVE ME that was 
the heaven at the back of time but we had it
here now black on black I wander frantic 
never done with worrying but it’s mine it’s
a cure that’s not in the books are you easy
my stolen pal what do you need is it
sleep like sleep you want a pillow a cool
drink oh my one safe place there must be
something just say what it is and it’s yours


Paul Monette. Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog. 1989.