I saw my heart today, inflow coded red
outflow coded blue, the coldest gel
the hardest probe rubbed on my chest
and there it was on the screen,
a small cauldron of intensity
beating. It seemed immortal—
the squeezing ventricles, the soundless click
of the tricuspid valve, the seizing
of its walls.

               Flickering, the pressure that lives
or kills was no mere poetry
but a threat I first felt at five
fearing the respirator advance on me,
its demon's barrel and bellows
my only foreseeable future for a while.
But the little deaths of polio muscles
never progressed above my knee
so the rest did laps for fifty years. . . .

Yesterday, in a scrim of gnats,
an anxious wind shook the tulip poplar
and a hollow branch fell like ash,
its scabrous skin cupped by the grass,
and air squeezed out until space collapsed
threw one thing down
so another might stretch the sky with breath—
that hope I felt
as the treadmill ran and ran.