Page 27 - WTP Vol.IX #3

Epidemiology
The highest form of love is to stay away from aging parents, from nearly everyone. Extended solitude can end the plague.
Though words and pictures struggle to convey what would have been expressed in person, the highest form of love is still to stay away,
even from those who can no longer say what year it is, the names of their children. Extended solitude was already their plague,
but the loss of linear time may be a mercy.
We went as often as we could, to hug them.
Now that the highest form of love is to stay away,
I try to reach my father in my mind, in ways we’d both have brushed aside as superstition before extended solitude and plagues
upended my devotion to the page
and his — he was an engineer — to reason. When the highest form of love is to stay away, every solitude contends against its plague.
Su is the author of the new poetry collection Peach State (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Her other books include Living Quarters, Having None of It and Sanctu- ary (all published by Manic D Press), and Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books). Her awards include fellowships from the Barbara Deming Fund and the NEA. In addition to inclusion in five volumes of Best American Poetry, her work has appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner and Cincinnati Review. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Poet-in-Residence at Dickinson College, PA.
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