April 8, 2020

Right around midnight, I took a walk through my neighborhood in the middle of the 38th-largest city in the United States, and I’ve never heard anything so quiet in my life. There’s no wind, and there’s no traffic. It’s 70 degrees out, so there isn’t even the hum and clank of climate control. I was alone with the rabbits and the neighbor’s cat, and when I stepped on a twig I suspect it was audible 200 yards away.

In years to come, there will be poems and movies and novels and songs about these weeks, but if they don’t at some point try to evoke that silence, they won’t be capturing all the truth of this moment, which has not shocked us with explosions or rubble, but has pressed down like a smothering pillow.

And yet, it is so, so beautiful tonight. The moon is full and the trees are balls of pink perfume. We Missourians only get so many perfect nights a year, and this is the first. I’m a professor of modern poetry, which means that I’m obligated every now and then to ask twenty-year-olds what it means to say that April is the cruelest month. The truth is that I myself never had an answer I didn’t get out of a textbook until tonight.

Beauty that doesn’t seem like that it ought to be there; incongruous loveliness; new life that reads as a tawdry joke—that is what can make April feel cruel.

Soon the wind will kick up, and someday the people will stir and the cars will roll, and I might live fifty more years and never again hear the silence I heard tonight. But right now it’s hard to hear anything else.