Infectious Exposure

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I.

They all wore masks in this doctor's office.
The woman he talked with there glowed
with quietness, and soon from behind the mask
he felt his face when he was little, still his face
as the blood-red and brown caked mask
dried like a place outside town after a rain,
a hill where they had dug forts when he was ten.

A few moments and his temperature
had become 4000 degrees of mercury
still cooling in the room from the birth
of the universe. When everything cools,
he wondered, what would light make
in that windy Great Lakes Bay,
eutrophic, when all the perch died?

II.

The physician entered the room, where they sat
at the edge of civilization. What will happen
after the rich have drained away the community?
Or is it magnetic fields sending the young off?
His mind now a black box voting machine,
certain mystery politics allowed him to stay-health,
grace, luck?-saving him from certain ending?

Maybe the angry ones feel guilty,
having survived birth, so they subscribe
to the doctrine of apocalypse and believe
tiny clusters of fertilized cells are souls
to protect but clusters grown to the point
they are having intricate organic surgery
or applying for college don't need help?

III.

As he left the office, his hair was loose,
telling him the mask was not in place
when a tattooed woman approached him,
tattoos on her tree-trunk legs, 100s of feathers
on her arms, her face like a Rushmore JFK's,
and her fingers thin and long for playing
a piano at the brink of the reformation.

The woman had retired from the service
of the well-invested. She walked solidly
where masks fell and fir roots grew.
Hazelnut trees holding summer wind
that propels the curve of snails and eye spans
of jays were part of how she walked,
the darkening late afternoon itself.