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Ye flowery banks o' bonie Doon, How can ye blume sae fair? How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' o' care? Thou'll break my heart, thou bonie bird, That sings upon the bough; Thou minds me o' the happy days, When my fause love was true. Thou'll break my heart, thou bonie bird, That sings beside thy mate; For sae I sat, and sae I sang, And wist na o' my fate. Aft hae I rov'd by bonie Doon To see the wood-bine twine, And ilka bird sang o' its luve, And sae did I o' mine. Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose Frae aff its thorny tree; And my fause luver staw my rose But left the thorn wi' me.

It was winter. The opposite of burning, which is also burning. My banner displayed clock parts, a cup of wine, a worm eating its opposite head. My motto was Try to Be Responsible, but every new moon was a sacrificial moon. Thirteen paving slabs were flipped into the river. The extra light of spring threw our business into relief. My banner displayed a sunburst, a bloodied hand dropping a knife, and in the other hand an avocado withholding its stone. War would soon come but not for us, and this became our motto,Not for Us. Then a crime in our community led to anger. Gossip gathered the truth into a ball; paperwork was spoiled; a man was removed from the yellow light of the barn. We heard his sobs coming from the orchard, and these were a source of comfort. Summer roused lanterns of dust under doorways, though a vinegar taste kept the air difficult. Antifa angels bathed their eyes in milk, as horses refused riders. The timid among us signed petitions swearing that when the time came we would know it by the rocks in our hands. I made a banner for the protests to come depicting the planting of milk teeth, the burning of a noose, a stadium left empty. Autumn was just my luck. I could not stomach the broth I boiled, and slept badly. Arguments I won in my head lost direction when formed out loud. The riots continued but quietly now, indoors. It was a time for manifestos, though the wrongs were too many for anything less than a lake. Friends kept the counsel of friends. In the yellow light of the barn we tried to write sentences each other would like, or not desire to alter. Together we designed a quilt depicting the wolf taking scent, water moving quickly, the sign of the errant cloud and alphabet, a baby resisting sleep, a worm eating its opposite head, only this time surrounded by snow, which hasn’t stopped falling since Thursday, the name we gave to our child.

I ask your doctor of infectious disease if she's read Williams   he cured sick babies I tell her and begin describing spring and all   she's looking at the wall now the floor   now your chart now the door   never heard of him she says but I can't stop explaining how important this is I need to know your doctor believes in the tenacity of nature to endure   I'm past his heart attack   his strokes   and now as if etching the tombstone myself   I find I can't remember the date he died or even the year   of what now are we the pure products   and what does that even mean   pure   isn't it obvious   we are each our own culture alive with the virus that's waiting to unmake us

Two flags nuzzle each other in the desultory gust because they are fleeing the trees, who are cruel to one another, shading their neighbors to death a mixed bag advocating small business in a loose confederation. The flags don’t give any shade at all. On the anniversary of our country we throw dynamite at the air we build into. * Daylight savings. A beeline to a sea lion, as the children’s song extols, or is it a beeline to a scallion? You hear your own accent— or a child makes an error to see if you’re listening. A heartfelt counterfeit. * A cough muffled in its own sputum’s repeated in the next throat: a family of coughs comes to couch in us while the sun rises over the church, treetops’ psych ops combusting all over the ground tasked with a snowdrop.

Now winter downs the dying of the year, And night is all a settlement of snow; From the soft street the rooms of houses show A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere, Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin And still allows some stirring down within. I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell And held in ice as dancers in a spell Fluttered all winter long into a lake; Graved on the dark in gestures of descent, They seemed their own most perfect monument. There was perfection in the death of ferns Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone A million years. Great mammoths overthrown Composedly have made their long sojourns, Like palaces of patience, in the gray And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii The little dog lay curled and did not rise But slept the deeper as the ashes rose And found the people incomplete, and froze The random hands, the loose unready eyes Of men expecting yet another sun To do the shapely thing they had not done. These sudden ends of time must give us pause. We fray into the future, rarely wrought Save in the tapestries of afterthought. More time, more time. Barrages of applause Come muffled from a buried radio. The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

The fingers lie in the lap, separate, lonely, as in the field the separate blades of grass shrivel or grow tall.

—for J.P.O. I have wished you dead and myself dead, How could it be otherwise. I have broken into you like a burglar And you've set your dogs on me. You have been a hurricane to me And a pile of broken sticks A child could kick. I have climbed you like a monument, gasping, For the exercise and the view, And leaned over the railing at the top– Strong and warm, that summer wind.

Such were they, a dumb stuffed thing to say, if truth is we all grow old un- observed, limbs flail only halfway up a flight, where does dark begin settling my little bones. I dream and do love to have them, blue fish in a lake, my head more tipped up than down under damp earth. Some days others like deer from the shot, peeled back, how I find trees dressed in wild green light. The years come, unstitched a face, saddled as one would a heavy beast for walking. Likely I became then a member of heaven, put up, the years come and reaching their long wet hands.

Nothing required an account of me And still I didn't give one. I might have been a virtual casualty, A late victim of the Millennium Bug. No spontaneity, no insubordination, Not even any spare capacity.

A word you can’t quite say without itching, flinching; it’s not easy to ignore its squirming appetite, stay your primal juddering. And yes, at night, each microbe gurns in the salty sea of gut and gullet, born again, boldly eats as you ate it, brews its own queasy tea of proto-raunch which it will quickly sate, birthing wanderlusting vigors, as yet unknown to microscience. They sashay, set out for the toes or gape through your eyes at your drooping lids, your fat bunch of keys, at this internal motel’s boss, bellhop, lackey, sat in the throne of his slumber, a mercy seat.