Sun just up on the century’s earliest equinox;

patchy snow in the woods, ice not yet out,

woodcock migrating into the alder thickets.

Far from woodsheds with less than a dry cord left,

the young winter-out on their counter-migrations:

wading the surf, getting wasted, pretending

they cannot die, and will not, as long as

their bodies tan, and burn to feel each other’s.

Far in the desert, out to arrest their government,

twelve hundred women and men, hands linked against

a chainlink fence, give themselves to arrest.

Handcuffed, shunted to barbedwire camps, they delay

the test for twenty-four hours. In which new day

thousands of death-needles are passed, uncountable

lovers die shunned by their parents, hundreds of 

children are born with systems in no way immune.

And millions of us, self-righteous

in the perfect democracy of backcountry roads, freeways,

and interstates, pass each other at life-span speeds;

or close, in opposing lanes, at a hundred-and-thirty,

trusting implicitly in simple self-interest, missing

each other, time after time, only by fragments of seconds,

as we move our lives, or dyings, another round toward

what March may be like in maybe the year 2000.