"Lung Compliance."
In quarantine.
"If, in my tangent, I turned contagious,
some one of 11 exceptions, nominal as I
am when lost, now in the wave glide,
in my rattled distraction, maybe the atmosphere held in the hold
a feeling of elastic measure.
I was pliant in the cellophane green-grass corridor of sleep,
and departure proximate.
But something conspired so that my destination
was, to the syndicate, unseen, as footsteps turn my knees now,
obliged to repel the pavement sand,
sound of sand in the multiples of three,
accent of a heartbeat.
Point I was given to demonstrate, unable, only
known in my foreign burning movement of muscle and bone.
Suddenly obvious, a steeple, a forest, prohibition, a star
point.
But so to in the great monument this vowel and sovereign name,
name of estuary, name of hillside, name of battle cry,
scene of the discarded begone, beheld, before I was born."