October 8, 2014
A blood moon gave way to autumn sunlight
on the morning Thomas Eric Duncan ceased to breathe.
How often will I have to write his name until
it dwells in my memory and casts a shadow
of mourning across our wide and careless landscape
where we believed new epidemics could not strike?
He waited long for a visa that would let him strike
out on a journey beyond Liberia. He traveled light,
leaving behind the chaos of West Africa’s landscape–
its civil wars and refugee camps. He longed to breathe
new languages and share old stories, out of the shadow
of a disease that languished in jungle villages until
it hitched a ride across the permeable borders until,
it reached cities, where it could reach out to strike
a wider population, extending its already long shadow.
Over half will survive, bearing antibodies, to see daylight.
In time nurses and doctors will no longer breathe
bleach fumes as the virus recedes from the landscape.
So many new graves mark many a landscape.
Foreign missionaries and newsmen, trapped until
planes were readied to fly them home to breathe
in isolation chambers where medical science can strike
back, bringing untested experimental drugs to light
and using blood transfusions to push back the shadow.
Dormant illness came with Thomas Eric Duncan. A shadow.
Skilled at concealment, it grew to a fever in a landscape
it had never known before. He brought it to light
while there was still a chance of his survival, until
in a Texas emergency room, the system delivered strikes.
No matter how many times it failed, he struggled to breathe.
Lost information, a misdiagnosis: he continued to breathe.
Treatment delayed, no matching blood: He held on to his shadow.
But this disease, named after a river, began to strike
organs, filled them with blood, flooding the landscape
from the ninth day of infection, spreading contamination until,
wrapped in seclusion, he never witnessed that blood moon’s light.
No one will know his loss until, dwelling in pandemic’s shadow
as light shifts with seasons, we stand in a changing landscape.
Strike a chime, bless Thomas Eric Duncan, and breathe.
I admit to having written awfully bad poems not worth editing, let alone publishing. But I didn't think this was one of them. This fits into another category, the failed poem.
How could a poem that meant so much to me be a failure? In this case, I’m defining failure as an inability to find a publisher: the one time I believed I had something to say to a larger audience, about Ebola and Thomas Eric Duncan. The vitriol that people posted in response to news stories about the case and his death horrified me. It was so dehumanizing, I had to address it. Almost a decade after I wrote Patient Zero I realize it bears too many burdens to stand.
Back in 2014, I still started poems in pencil on paper. So, printed out reference materials and tortured drafts still exist. Rejected: a much stronger opening line that got buried in later drafts, How often will I have to write his name. . . ? The image of the blood moon which I started with was poorly handled. Complex, convoluted sentences end up sounding prosy.
The form of the sestina gave me the distance needed to write about a death that devastated me. Thomas Eric Duncan died in isolation, his last visit with family via closed circuit television, his care providers in hazmat suits. The demands of the sestina killed my attempt to convey that sorrow. Its thirty-nine lines are stuffed with facts. Choosing distance over anger or sorrow can be a mistake.
The fault doesn’t lie in the form. A world of powerful sestinas exists, a number of them in Obsession: Sestinas for the Twenty-first Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014.) Nor with my ability to practice it. My own "Some Stars Are Not Used for Navigation” can be found in Obsession. Another sestina I wrote, “Wife of a Prison Gardener,” was published at Off the Coast, Winter 2012. But in this particular case, if I had been free of the form, I may well have told the story more deeply and directly.
Years after Patient Zero was written, we dwell in the shadow of a different virus epidemic. We stand in a changed landscape. Can I write a gentler elegy for Thomas Eric Duncan?
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