My Brother Knows Oxygen

He knows respiration, knows the difference
between the air at sea level 
and in the mountains. He knows 
how to assess an airway, how to cajole 
a patient to keep coughing through pain, 			
how to fit an oxygen mask so it seals,
how to watch the ball rise 
and wriggle in the spirometer. He knows 
how a vein in the leg can fire 
a weapon at the lungs, 					
how the lungs can learn.

Such devotion to the breath,
to ushering oxygen in and out of the body.
So intimate with that double bound molecule,		
the element O2, the most fundamental 
nourishment of all. My brother’s God 
must look like the illustration of wind 
in our nursery book, the puff-cheeked cloud 
blowing out a grand whoosh of swirls.			

Tonight two photos of lungs on the news: 
the first a healthy lung, as full of breath 			
and breeze as a field of Queen Anne’s Lace. 
Beside it a swamp of a lung, bloated 
with covid pneumonia. Can that be			
how my brother’s lungs looked  
when they took him in?					

The nurse on the telephone tells me 
they heard him mumble
in his sleep: oximeter, intubate,
saturation, familiar lyrics sung
to the rhythm of the compressor 				
and the beeping of the monitors. 
How does he know 
about those things, they wondered. 

He doesn’t know what the nurses know:	
through the fevered days 
he reaches again and again to tear 
the bothersome mask 
and its gift of oxygen
away from his face.

---

Stephanie Striffler cannot remember a time before she knew the transport of poetry. Her poems have appeared in Calyx Journal, Tar River Poetry, San Pedro River Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has twice won Oregon Poetry Association prizes, and her poems are included in the Oregon Poetry Association anthology Pãn-dé-mïk 2020, as well as the Poeming Pigeon anthology, From Pandemic to Protest. Stephanie spent her early years in New Mexico and Michigan before choosing Oregon as home, where she served for decades as a lawyer for the people of Oregon. She finds joy and solace in birding excursions near and far. At last count she had observed eight species of sparrow in her Portland, Oregon yard. Poetry saves her life every day.