Mark O'Brien, a 46-year-old poet and journalist, is the subject of the 1997 Oscar-award winning documentary film "Breathing Lessons," directed by Jessica Yu and co-produced by Pacific News Service and Inscrutable Films. O'Brien contracted polio at the age of six and has spent most of the last forty years in an iron lung. His determination to live independently, write and obtain a university degree (he is a graduate of UC Berkeley) gained the support of the then-growing movement for the rights of disabled people. His first book of poems, entitled "Breathing," was published by Little Dog Press in 1987. He is currently completing an autobiography to be published by Kodansha. His Web site is <http://www.pacificnews.org/marko>

BREATHING

By Mark O'Brien

Grasping for straws is easier;
You can see the straws.
"This most excellent canopy, the air, look you,"
Presses down upon me
At fifteen pounds per square inch,
A dense, heavy, blue-glowing ocean,
Supporting the weight of condors
That swim in its churning currents.
All I get is a thin stream of it,
A finger's width of the rope that ties me to life
As I labor like a stevedore to keep the connection.
Water wouldn't be so circumspect;
Water would crash in like a drunken sailor,
But air is prissy and genteel,
Teasing me with its nearness and pervading immensity.
The vast, circumambient atmosphere
Allows me but ninety cubic centimeters
Of its billions of gallons and miles of sky.
I inhale it anyway,
Knowing that it will hurt
In the weary ends of my crumpled paper bag lungs.

THE MAN IN THE IRON LUNG

By Mark O'Brien

I scream
The body electric,
This yellow, metal, pulsing cylinder
Whooshing all day, all night
In its repetitive dumb mechanical rhythm.
Rudely, it inserts itself in the map of my body,
Which my midnight mind,
Dream-drenched cartographer of terra incognita,
Draws upon the dark parchment of sleep.
I scream
In my body electric;
A dream snake bites my left leg.
Indignant, I shake the gods by their abrupt shoulders,
Demanding to know how such a vile slitherer
Could enter my serene metal shell.
The snake is punished with death,
The specialty of the gods.
Clamp-jawed still in my leg,
It must be removed;
The dream of the snake
Must be removed,
While I am restored
By Consciousness, the cruelest of gods,
In metal hard reluctance
To my limited, awkward, declase
Body electric,
As it whispers promises of health,
Whooshes beautiful lies of invulnerability,
Sighs sibilantly, seraphically, relentlessly:
It is me,
It is me.

IN DECEMBER, THE FAN LOOKS FORWARD TO SPRING

I wonder when the baseball season starts,
When men will fall upon the diamond's dust
Pursuing liners they will never catch.
In Spring, the contest's not between the teams.
It is the rookies trying to make the club;
The veterans striving for another year.
I love this slow, exquisite, formal game,
Enjoyed by Mexicans and Japanese,
Because it gives me pleasures of the soul,
Flamboyant passions of the matador,
An oriental silkscreen's certain peace.