Sheltering With Friends
by Mohamad Said Bazzi
(February, 2021)
1
Sheltering with friends
from the winter
inside a garage in Ford's Dearborn
sheltering from this new
state of capture
this novel quarantine
a car exhales
its workday's remnant fumes
it roosts just inches
from the modest little plastic skamla
that gathers us around it
a grimy plastic surface
strewn with
traces of cashews,
hollow shells devoid of pistachios,
shriveled serpentine clementine peel,
insignificant flakes of ash wafting about,
enduring cigarette burns scorched
deep into the rigid plastic surface
of the bashful little skamla
like crashed aircraft skids
and echoes of our
last pronouncements
2
Our aging knees and spines
subdued by a punishing day
yet again
our weakened teeth and eyes
incapable of sin
our shoulders loaded with bundles
of sighs and concessions
anything we declare
is but a temporary triumph,
a venture in words
3
Outside,
a dark evening overtakes
the February landscape
an exacting razor-like wind
offers cold, sobering atonements
for anyone with the courage to atone
few are the takers
Outside,
the heart of a crushing storm
hurls its icy munitions
at the walls of our shelter
before stumbling begrudgingly on
to other misfortunes
Outside,
a mass pandemic
an anointed shutdown
a societal convulsion
the ferocious jumbling
of worlds and forces
4
Inside,
the secretive adventurist elations
of three wistful men
giddy wondering aloud
what may emerge anew
my tall friend is smoking,
waiting for nothing anymore
he grasps with a silent will
at the old promises of liberation
he moves his hand slowly
towards his charming ravaged ashtray
my other friend is also smoking,
rather petulantly
he forages with a silent will
for the promises of redemption
his disquieted gaze focused forward
onto a shifting wall of smoke
as if to follow a frightful muted
theatrical projection
that only he can see
we talk about how much we can
still remember
and how much
we can still conjure
I watch them both stammer,
between moments of my own
wildly blithe
decrees
5
Outside,
tender shoes press obscurely
into layered snow
he says his son,
coming home from work
from university
from the perilous minglings
with the people
from the daily searchings
of early manhood
6
We listen from our shelter
to the frenzied thrillful night outside
gloriously eerie sounds,
like lavishly illustrated storybook pages
howling snowy white brushstrokes,
savagely mingled between
swerving blacks and blues
and small orbs of borrowed gold
globules of light
guidance
dangling in the night
the night sky sits heavy,
overlaid with murmurings
voices sprinkling warmth
across the infinite dark
the outstretched fingers
of the helpless
reaching across the soft, cottony
fibers of time