Leaving: A Poem from the Time of the Virus

Cees Nooteboom’s Leaving opens with a mystery. A man standing in a winter garden notices that a cloud seems off kilter. The night “needed to be set right.” But it is not clear what exactly is wrong or why. The confusion may stem from the fact that Nooteboom began writing the poems in this collection in a pre-coronavirus era and finished them amid “the mysterious virus that is suddenly ruling the world.” Although he had planned to write on other topics, reality took over and helped “write the poem.” 

While the world enters a state of panic, the poet’s “quiet surroundings, northern landscapes” remain immune from this virus. In the garden in which he writes, “duration has no predicate, time no imperative.” A spirit of intense seclusion, and a surreal timelessness, pervades the poems. Although COVID-19 is alluded to repeatedly in the afterword, the solitude evoked in these poems seems to have a different, more transcendental, origin.

The poems are all untitled. Austere and impersonal, they lack visible traces of current events. Instead, they seem to belong to a world apart, not unlike the black and white sketches of men and women by Max Neumann that are interwoven throughout this collection. Like the poems themselves, these drawings turn individuals into abstractions. They also make their way into Nooteboom’s poems:

My strange domain. My friends who don't
have mouths. All points and angular arms
they guard the walls and wait with me for words
to come so I can slot them in 

Throughout these poems, lived experience “cleavers / under words” and “under skies / that are always the same.” While life unravels like a virus, with no clear endpoint or destination, the poems in this collection are a reminder of poetry’s capacity to give order to chaos, to create a world in which “Nothing will be left undone.”