Virus
Like the other wounds I carry it transforms my core
carves the flowered seat into its own cottage, where
decomposing stone molders by the roadway
an old bucket tips over by the door
A dank familial smell decorates the air.
Grass rises up through fallen tines—a forest of tools
buried deep in built-up soil
that root-rich matrix unyielding as ignorance.
This morning the heavy trucks have come
and trailers bearing scrapers. Dozers to push away
the last quivers of the old world.
I have become the host
of a landscape drawn and named,
an erasure, uncontained.
Growing up on a small farm, Delia Garigan assumed animals could understand her words. Later she aspired to time travel, but ended up with a degree in neuroscience instead. After a period of intensive Zen study, she grew her hair out and had a family. As a respite from the consuming work of wrangling her descendants, Delia also enjoys hammering jewelry, eating Khmer food, and inhaling the blackberry scent that pervades Oregon’s deciduous forests.
