A Sense of Scale

 All day long, you enter the dark mouths

of tractor trailers to unload their cargo: Dry wall.

Floor tile. Refrigerators. Paint.

Each thousand-pound pallet of boxes

a shrink-wrapped synonym for the house

we’ve been told to shelter in. I clean out

the attic, the shed, the garage; monitor the burning

of the backyard brush pile; haul junk to the landfill

where I hold my breath against the stink and imagine

the crater yawning beyond and everything that fills it.

Numbers, they say, don’t matter to us

until we conceptualize them. Four million virus cases

is Yankee Stadium packed 74 times over.

700 deaths in my state is five downed planes, the kind

we take to visit our family. What does death mean

except here no more? All day long, you run your blade

through cellophane, slice into cardboard, peer into

the boxes of other people’s desires. All day long, I inhale

what’s left after: dust and ash. The bed we share

is six feet wide: a fathom, an oak tree’s taproot, a grave.

Which is it. All I know is tonight, after we’ve scrubbed off

the monotonous hours, after laboring to describe these

new times, we will pull each other closer in worry

and in comfort, and we will call that silence home.

Please tell us something more about the poem:

During the Covid-19 pandemic, my husband was considered an essential worker at our local big box store, where he spent each day unloading tons of freight from delivery trucks. It was ordinary, physical work, but during the early months of lockdown, when no one knew what was happening and people were wiping down packages with Lysol before bringing them inside, it carried a new kind of uncertainty and fear. I, meanwhile, taught from home. We had not been married long, and only a few months before the outbreak, we had bought our first house together. I have always enjoyed the rituals of making a home, but during the pandemic, those rituals took on a sharper urgency. The tension between the small scale of our daily lives and the enormous scale of the crisis unfolding around us, and my attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to articulate and hold those two realities together, is what I wanted to explore in the poem. 

Carrie Jerrell is the author of the poetry collection After the Revival, which won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and was published by Waywiser Press. She earned her MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and her PhD from Texas Tech University. Currently, she is an associate professor of creative writing at Murray State University in Murray, KY.