To die, to risk life 
to pack boxes
because I want to cover
my grays? 
 
I conduct inventory: 
Chad and Ed are sick, Priya is better, 
Doug is improved, Jon is still healthy. 
A friend’s father died, 
as did a stranger’s. 
Widows forced to grieve alone. 
 
There is no hard evidence, 
none tested. Normally effortless,
 
I must remember to exhale
and inhale, each cycle savoring 
the air caressing my alveoli
like my mother’s hand 
through my hair.
                        

I always wanted to go to Italy I hear 
my mother say, in my memory, 
in my grief, once again, like her I cry 
 
in church. Only this Easter church is here
in my living room. The same room
where I received the call of her dying, 
where I last told her I loved her, and then, 
waiting for the airport shuttle, received the call
that she could not wait.  
 
Bocelli sings to us this Easter from the empty Duomo. 
 
She always cried when we sang Amazing Grace, confessing 
how wretched and lost we are.  Alone, we think, 
Bocelli sings was blind but now I see. 
But there is a camera and an audio engineer, 
the organist inside, and people sheltering
at home, and all of us, watching.
 
As I am. Alone in my home fearing the one breath
that could bring in this pneumonia. 
 
It was a rare pneumonia that tethered 
my mother to oxygen. She could not go out 
for long. Before the tank ticked to empty 
we barely make it through lunch. Even in her home, 
she trailed plastic tubes as she shuffled 
from kitchen to couch, couch to toilet, toilet to bed. 
At night, I’d change the bandage on her foot 
where oxygen was too scarce to heal 
a wound. How she would have loved 
 
this Easter watching the sweeping vistas
of the quiescent wonders of Milan, London, 
Paris, and New York, where we rode the ferry 
to Ellis Island, ate pizzas, and hailed
yellow cabs to bring us home.