Trucks and horse-drawn vans rumble through Lexington’s streets
hauling the dead to Union Station. Pyramids of caskets
sway precariously, ten on the first layer up to poignant oneness.
A crying need for coffins echoes where lumbermen lie
in their beds, felled by influenza.  

Doctors’ prescriptions and home inventions proliferate:
rot-gut whiskey or the real deal, fresh-cut onions,
snake oil liniment, laxatives, camphor, quinine,
asafetida in red flannel hung from a neck cord,
gravy or Oxo beef bouillon, fumes (nitrous oxide? Opium?),
blood-letting, saltwater gargles,
exorcism.