Finding Perspective
By Nancy Harris McLelland
“Comedy comes from what we know about living and dying,” says 95-year-old Mel Brooks in a recent AARP publication. A sense of humor that gave me perspective; that, and vaccinations, a booster, and my ability to tolerate my own company. Oh, and luck.
Here is a selection of poems I wrote during the pandemic:
In March of 2020, the optimism of spring was not in the air.
“What Spring Looks Like from Space”
Spring Equinox, 2020
Today I rearranged my fake flowers.
I placed the fake grape hyacinths
on the fireplace mantel, put a fake spring bouquet
on a table by the couch, the plastic succulents
on a shelf above the kitchen sink.
The real daffodils in the front yard were bent low
by more than six inches of spring snow.
I doubt the tulips along the driveway
will survive the vagrant deer that come down
from the mountain this time of year.
Did you see that satellite photo
of the spring equinox?
Here in the Western hemisphere
we’re tilted toward the sun,
not shaded by darkness,
even though it feels that way.
Do you remember when we started hoarding, handwashing, suspecting our neighbors were disease vectors. Do you remember we started using a made-up word, “Othering?”
The Sound of One Shoe Dropping
“...to dread what might happen next won’t prepare you for disaster…”
“Always Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop?” Jennifer Taitz NYT 8/8/2019
What if the one-legged tenant in the upstairs apartment
drops his boot with a thump and there you are staring
at the ceiling, waiting, because you never bothered to learn
who lives above, below, or about any neighbor, for that matter,
and you are waiting for something that’s not going to happen,
and you are missing out on meeting a really good person,
but no, not you, with your negative expectation
and lurid imagination, you insist on reading the worst
in the paint’s imperfections, in the shadows and cracks,
and you persist in believing doom follows gloom
as night follows day and there you are waiting…
I remember a point where I felt I had a choice: retreat into fear or toughen up.
A curmudgeon coping with COVID and the 2020 election answers the question,
“How are you doing?”
I am doing my best to stay away
from the neurotic, the lazy, and the
just plain crazy as they come in a cloud
(that cloud) of indignation, frustration,
paranoia, and plain old panic, wearing
angry red stripes or a self-righteous blue.
I am doing my best to fight the dread
of human touch--a squeeze, or a hug,
a pat on the shoulder. Signs of affection
send me in the opposite direction.
I closed the door, took up the welcome mat.
I’m in hibernation, waiting for vaccination.
That’s that!
As campaigning for the 2020 presidency intensified, so did the fear mongering and the paranoia. There came a point when all the conspiracy theorizing seemed, well, nuts!
I wish I had a conspiracy theory
Then everything in my world would make sense,
the Bernie bros and the friends of Mike Pence.
AOC, Ivanka Trump, Cardi B
would fit into one hashtag mystery,
The Q-Anon boys would have a spot
in my dysfunctional Camelot.
The Antifa guys would have their place.
I would understand Outer Space!
The Bitcoin carnivores, vegans in pleather,
the RINOs, the Soros, even Big Pharma,
all the cabals in my delusional diorama–
we would be one Big Bird of a paranoid feather.
By this time, I was learning hard lessons about the necessity of social isolation.
Thinking Inside the Box
I much prefer to think inside the box
these days because the cardboard walls provide
a sane asylum, sanctum sanctorum,
for my thoughts not fraught with desperation.
This staycation frees me for contemplation
of the aesthetics of corrugation,
frees me from musings on lack of control.
I’m tired of all the consternation and gall.
I’ll stay boxed in a lotus position
and think about nothing, nothing at all.
There was a point when it got really bad. I was in Tuscarora at the time.
The Widow Watches the Road
“Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful.”
Samuel Becket, Waiting for Godot
I catch myself standing at the window watching the road. I see a white FedEx truck or the brown, boxy UPS; a hunter hauling his ATV up the hill; a rancher whose empty horse trailer stays hitched to her dusty and dented half-ton truck; two or three SUV’s. They’re not coming to see me. Sometimes I see Ben returning home from a night shift at the hospital, driving his dad’s Hummer just to keep the battery charged. I doubt his father will return from that rehab center with the silly name, “Bounce Back.” Hard to keep track of who comes and who goes. The other day I saw the sheriff’s car heading up the hill. I read in the Free Press an inmate in the county jail walked away from his roadside clean-up. Maybe the deputy thought the fugitive might come this way. Desolate enough. Sometimes I think about going to Gun World in Elko and buying a handgun. Sometimes I think about getting another rat terrier. Such good barkers. Did I ever tell you Dora Waage’s toast, best heard in her Scottish brogue: “Here’s to us. Who’s like us? Damn few and they’re all daid.”
Then it was spring 2021! The worst seemed to be over. We were vaccinated. For a brief time, we took off our masks and smiled at each other. I remember a Facebook post by my writer friend Trina Mahechek who lives in Eureka, Nevada, about the vultures in a tree in her yard.
Here’s to Trina, the cock-eyed optimist
Strabismus is a condition in which eyes do not point in the same direction
When Trina watched fourteen vultures with six-foot wingspans
in a bare-branched cottonwood tree outside her door
as they flew away in one astonishing swoop, she did not say,
“The sight of red-headed vultures makes my heart sing.”
Ever the cock-eyed optimist, she said, “Look! A sign of spring!”
Well, that was short-lived, wasn’t it? Fire season began:
Pareidolia
...the perception of apparently...recognizable images...in random arrangements
Half-formed apples drop in midsummer heat, out of season.
Winds carry a whiff of death from fires in every direction.
“Apocalyptic,” repeat the talking heads on the television.
Do I see the Apostle Peter in the smoke?
He did promise fire this time.
He said it was our collective fault.
Maybe pride blurs our vision.
What if nothing is revealed in the wind and fire
except the indifference of the elements?
And then came omicron. Time to sing the blues.
The Omicron Blues
If you’ve got the omicron blues
feel free to add a verse.
According to the news
it’s gonna get some better
or it’s gonna get some worse.
As 2021 ended and 2022 began, I needed to look for good news. At the same time the atmosphere of doom and gloom had intensified and being cheerful seemed unnatural, especially at my age.
Euangelion or Good News
Somewhere there are dead cats with maggots,
whole cities rubbled, and unrepentant youths
gunning one other. Blood. Guts. Excrement.
Ahem! Assuming your attention,
I would like to mention March twenty-five,
the Annunciation, Good News to quite a few.
And, in case you missed it–
yes, I’m talking about your preoccupation
with death and damnation–
while you were looking for trouble
the James Webb telescope, more powerful
than the Hubble, launched into space
on December twenty-five.
And the scientists, our better angels
more often than not, imagined a voyage
back to the birth of the universe.
Yep. Hope.
Seriously! Hope!
Photo courtesy of Nancy Harris McLelland.
An Elko County native with a background in ranching, Nancy Harris McLelland divides her time between Carson City and Tuscarora, Nevada, where she has lived part-time for over 25 years.
She earned her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Nevada, Reno, and an M.A. in Language Arts and Literature from the University of New Mexico. An early attendee at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, McLelland has presented her Poems from Tuscarora at both daytime and evening events. Her essay, BorderLands: Cowboy Poetry and the Literary Canon can be found in the anthology, Cowboy Poetry Matters. McLelland has conducted writing workshops for the Western Folklife Center, Great Basin College, and the Great Basin Writing Project. More recently, she was a judge for the state finals for Poetry Out Loud.
She has published her poetry in various literary journals as well as on her blog, Writing from Space–Memoir, Essays and Poetry from the Wide Open Spaces of Northeastern Nevada, which is also accessible through the Facebook page Tuscarora Writers Retreats.
Just before her 80th birthday in November, 2021, McLelland self-published a poetry chapbook, Lucretius Visit Tuscarora and Other Poems. She is grateful to The Reno Poetry Group, her online poetry group, for the honest critiquing and the unconditional support given to one another. (This is a shout out to Melanie Parish).
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