Before

by Jane Hilberry

It’s not as though I was living with a lover, gorging
on the daily bread of sex, before the governor told us all
to stay home. It’s not as if grandchildren piled

into bed with me in the mornings begging
to visit the horses that live — oddly — past the edge
of my apartment complex. In truth,

I’d come home and drop my purse and keys,
feed the cat, eat something myself,
sink into the couch & click on the TV.

It’s not what I hear people say –
“I miss hugs” –
which annoys me somehow.

It’s that now, when students mute themselves,
I can’t hear the always-late kid
scrape his chair up to the table, can’t smell

the egg and bagel that he unwraps;
I can’t hear the kids’ pencils scratching
the page, their hair falling into their eyes.

It was all a form of touch.
Kara arranging snacks for our staff meetings,
Dez’s laugh, the clip of Jessica’s clogs

heading out to walk Finn. And Seth,
who is there like the earth itself.
Am I writing a love letter to my workplace?

My office is calm, painted green, and everyone
has a key. I miss the breeze
coming through the screen,

voices of students kicking a ball
on the quad, children running
to the sno-cone truck to pick flavors.

I’m alone in bed, reading. The spring wind shifts.
I can almost hear buds opening.
My mind’s on an edge.

If I can’t walk toward someone, it might just crack.

Originally appeared in the July 2021 issue of The Sun;
and in Viral Verses: Art in Exceptional Times,
Edited by Nicholas Linstead and Stephen Linstead.

Books by Jane Hilberry, available from Amazon and your local bookstore.

Though written during the pandemic, Jane Hilberry’s honest poem resonates at this moment as well, when so many of us find ourselves reemerging into the world, heading out to offices and workplaces again (or deciding to make larger life changes). The life she describes before the pandemic was obviously governed by solitude: “I’d come home and drop my purse and keys,/feed the cat, eat something myself,/sink into the couch, and click on the TV.” The simplicity of these lines—almost every word is a single syllable—feels comfortable and familiar, too. Yet as the poem proceeds, and she considers what she truly misses during the quarantine (“It’s not that I miss hugs,” she confesses), the speaker surprises herself by “writing a love letter” to her office, which we gather must be a school of some type. The crux of this piece for me, however, is the line that swings the door of the poem wide open: “It was all a form of touch.” Here, Hilberry echoes what so many of us discovered during the lockdown, as we missed the ordinary objects and people we no longer encountered on a daily basis. Every small moment of familiarity and connection (“Dez’s laugh, the clip of Jessica’s clogs”) was a form of touch that we had to learn to live without for a time. “My mind’s on edge,” Hilberry writes at the very end. “If I can’t walk toward someone, it might just crack.” She speaks, of course, to this deep desire in each of us not to be a threat to one another anymore, to approach someone on the street or in the office without fear. Yet she also captures a larger need for the daily human contact that becomes a kind of intimacy, even if it never involves literal touch. By bringing us so deeply into her personal world, she reminds us of the connections we might choose to value with each other now, as normalcy is slowly restored in our lives.

Invitation for Writing & Reflection: What are the “forms of touch,” those seemingly small points of contact from daily life, that you missed during the pandemic? How has your outlook shifted as we begin to emerge again?

ABOUT THE POET: Jane Hilberry

Jane Hilberry, Professor of Creativity and Innovation at Colorado College, gets great joy from working with her students. Her books of poems include Body Painting, which won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry, and most recently Still the Animals Enter, from Red Hen Press. She is currently experimenting with combining text and visual elements in poems.

POETRY SELECTION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES CREWS

James Crews is the author of four collections of poetry: The Book of What Stays, Telling My Father, Bluebird, and Every Waking Moment. He is also the editor of two anthologies: Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine, The Sun, and have been reprinted in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry and featured on Tracy K. Smith’s podcast, The Slowdown. James teaches at SUNY-Albany and lives with his husband in Vermont.

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