ISOLATION, DAY 53: Learning to Exhale

My walls are infected.
They stagger
wheezing
fever sweat dripping
closer and closer to where I sit.
So I
escape to the back yard where yellow finches
little sparks of life
flit unfettered feeder to fence.
One spies me
flutters across the yard to land on the nearby railing.
His head jerks
up left right down up
then his black pinprick eyes fix on me.
He opens his tiny beak and sings
four notes
three rising, one falls:
“Carpe Diem” he says.
And again so I’m sure to hear it
“Carpe Diem.”
Then he springs up
wings back to the feeder, tracing that
swooping ‘W’ shape finches draw in the air as they soar
and I’m left
inhaling trembling breaths
exhaling in Latin.