I was washing an eggplant at the end of the world on
February 4 2020 when I heard from Vincent. It was
Mozart's 39;s birthday, a momentous event that the melophiliac
Vincent Katz would never have let pass without a
celebratory panegyric. There it was in the email, beginning
Its Mozart's39th birthday. He's only 264.years old; Mozart died young
but kept on living. Vincent and I were older already than
Mozart was when he died, but if we had any chance at
living as long as he did we had better get to work. We are
poets but our immortality is far from ensured. Our
contributions to the archive of the aptly named School for
Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder
Colorado are so our only bid for a mozartian afterlife.
Not enough. Beginning with Mozart we began our search
for the aqua vita of the long poem that would be sung by
the melomanes of the future. CoVid was our last chance to
make embodied poetry that would keep living in the future,
as long as we washed our vegetables, masked our faces,
disinfected the doorknobs, stayed six feet away from all
human beings -- and wrote to each other via the as-yet
uncontaminated internet. And if we kept celebrating our
immortal predecessors while noting the daily routines to
preserve our bodies, we might make it into that future via
our (regularly disinfected) keyboards.
Our common bonds at that curious time of the planet-
engulfing Plague were various: we were friends, we were
poets, we took poetry seriously enough to believe in its
superpowers, but above all, we both had mothers who at
ages past Ninety needed the care and attention that we two
could provide them. Our exchanges quickly became an
ongoing epic of care. It became also a store of
reminiscences, activities and ideas that paid homage to
the women we cared for, communiques and confessions
that we would have liked them to appreciate. Happily, at
least for me, my mother was past appreciating our
fabulous antics though she smiled, sometimes
appropriately, when I hit Send. She passed away on
September 20, 2022, and is now in my room, listening
without recourse. Happily, Vincent's mother is, as of this
date, still listening in her body to this epic of care. Andrei Codrescu