“Million-More Dead, Summ’d Up — The Known”

Million-More Dead, summ’d up—The Known.¹—The Dead in this Plague—where do they lie, stacking morgues and ERs and homes for the elderly and battle-fields of the South—Florida, the Atlantic Coast—Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood—the shores of Biscayne Bay—the patios of art deco South Beach—Miami Baptist Hospital—the cafeterias turned wards—the forget-me-nots on caring bridges—the grisly pulls for air—the suffocating promenades of our inner Wildernesses—the oceanic waves of those swept under, (the estimate of the Health Department is a number larger than we can fathom kill’d in the undertow, thousands drown’d hitherto in emulsified lung tissue—multiples of thousands inhumed by gowned medical workers or stacked in rented refrigerated vans, most all mark’d tagg’d nam’d lov’d—or 3,000 in mass graves covered by hand-shoveled soil, by way of yesterday’s tragedies, or 780 unclaimed frozen bodies with wandering souls, &c.) Ground Zero, the East, Northeast—New York—New Jersey—the unemployment claims of Connecticut—the make-shift ICUs, prior conference rooms, auditoriums, field Hospitals everywhere—the crop reap’d by the mighty reapers, ARDS, thrombolytics, fibroses, renal disease, ataxias, Inflammations—and decrepit and putrefying of all, the dead and living lies-asunder, shrouded gravediggers fingers folded behind rotted backs, the Prison-Pens of San Quentin, Pickaway, Estelle, the Reformatory of Kentucky, &c., (Rodin’s Gates of Hell hath opened herein confined to the blackened pits of lonely deaths)—what dead, what dead, whose dead—our dead—or South or North, ours all, (do you recall what it meant to be held by somebody, a body politic)—or the West—Pacific Coast or Willamette Valley—the clinic-less towns of maskless breaths, the lone pay per view skew’d in his apartment or kitchen buffet or in the roadside café, fallen there, or the coffin of intubation—(there, in borrowed beds, warmed and ready, their incredulousness’s, wetted brows, wide-eyed, shaking ‘no’ with the freight train push of old model PAPs, their silences are echoing)—culture bearers from wars past, seeds of language in clasped hands, spirited—the matriarch from the butterflies, the division head from the department, the grand wise from the reckless, the bearer of from the bearer for, keystones, the clusters of infections, in Alabama, Mississippi, and in Georgia—hitherto in silent caves, edema legs, punishing souls, clotted trees, backs to the sky, seizing, shoeless, gowned, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)—the embolized with bloodless hearts, or the listless in wandering fogs, maps of wars superimposing maps of disease, or bleached (the morally deplet’d planted potter’s fields in the hearts, minds of medical staffs—autoeuthaniz’d tabooed as the guards of the capital that one day in Washington)—from sea to shining sea—the general Million in the empty metal foldout chairs in football fields—do we believe dead—the Infinite dead—(cities plummed with hemorrhaging ashes evaporated in earth’s atmospheres, one dissolv’d breath the earth heaves in sighed resignations, our branding iron of shared histories)—not only believers dying in the land of non-believers—countless multitudes of non-believers are occasionally found yet.