“No Exit” neon-signaled through a wall
of glass a dozen floors above the ground.
And we in that glass conference room were all
like passengers within a lifeboat, bound
upon a sea of stress to any berth,
intense around our table top to know,
a hundred fifty feet above the earth,
just where the day’s discovery would go.

As if we were survivors of a storm,
an intimacy grew among the eight
within that place. Tenacity and warm
amazing patience took us to a late
relief, and finally I understood
their cowardice, and they allowed me good.