Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. . .
–William Shakespeare, Sonnet XVIII
Who could have seen this coming the river squatted in its bed shoulders thick with houses going rogue and shaking it all off like a dog shedding fleas and puddle water? A whole family drowned and gone missing except the father who rode a snag of siding and shingles back to the bank somewhere between these limestone hills and the walleyed Gulf of Mexico; the darling buds of May survive of course as they in their leases tend to do kettle-corned & popping under the hot blind eye of a Texas summer sun into bursts of ready leaves and flowers humming with bees as though to hide the sound of the river’s hurry to sow like grains of rice another big handful of the sinful into its sacral waters sated with drowning and now biding like any living thing its time as it herds ineluctable these gifts of flesh and the solemn slow- rolled trunks of trees ever downward branch by sky by light like hands that urge lost children home to sleep in quiet beds.