When the Queen of England laments
her annis horribilis,
her year of scandal and fire,
I think instead of my annis mirabilis,
my year of luck and vigor,
when I caught no cold
and saved and spent
and named myself anew.
Juice, juice—
ideas infused me, and flowed through me.
Then they slowed.
I’d only just hoisted my ladder to the branches
when the fruit fell.

The fruit falls, the miracles trick us.
I was cured of pneumonia once
by a marvelous drug
which germs have since outwitted.
There’s no remedy now
for babies wailing with earache,
for sepsis, for the bronchitic cough
and journalists file the story:
plague, pandemic, war
waged with microbes of recombinant design.
The brief age of salus is past,
a new dark age draws near.

And journalists file the story:
a great heat is coming,
a great frigidity.
Anni mirabili, anni horribili.
The lucky epoch winds down
like an obsolete clock.