On Learning That Fast & Furious 9 Was Delayed Until Next Year Due To Coronavirus

This news obviously
was not meaningful.
Our coping mechanisms

surely could repel this
loss of something trivial:
Two & a half hours

of quick cuts, downshifts,
exchanges of violence.
But somehow we felt it,

this new absence hung
around us like our own
silver necklaces, passed

back & forth, a weight
that we felt even before
there were real things

to worry about. Now,
even among all this dying
there is crass symbolism

in the slow & stagnant wait
to find relief in a movie
about family, veined muscles,

an open road crisscrossed
by the impossible dance
of increasingly ludicrous cars,

& even in the utterly
tacky street race celebrations,
twisting bodies perilously

close, skin against skin
in what seems an obscenely
generous proximity

we almost can’t remember,
a closeness we may not see
for a long & lonely time.