from Quarantine

Somehow I am sturdier, more shore

than sea-spray as I thicken through

the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness.

You give me morning, Lord, as you

give earthquake to all architecture.

I can forget.

                           You put that sugar

in the melon’s breath, and it is wet

with what you are. (I, too, ferment.)

You rub the hum and simple warmth

of summer from afar into the hips

of insects and of everything.

I can forget.

                           And like the sea,

one more machine without a memory,

I don’t believe that you made me.

I don’t believe that you made me

into this tremolo of hands,

this fever, this flat-footed dance

of tendons and the drapery

of skin along a skeleton.

I am that I am: a brittle

rib cage and the hummingbird

of breath that flickers in it.

Incrementally, I stand:

in me are eons and the cramp

of endless ancestry.

Sun is in the leaves again.

I think I see you in the wind

but then I think I see the wind.