Delia Garigan

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.