Some Medical News (written 2008)

I have not done much writing this year. Bill, my husband has been near fatally ill and I just haven't thought about much else.

Here are a couple of medical poems:

Testing the Heart

The doctors want to see if my heart is broken,
if I was born with a problem
other than that of loving and dying.

I lie calm and restrained,
a needle strapped to the back of my hand,
marked on the front of my feet with indelible stigmata
indicating where else I could receive input.
I am a bag of waterborne chemicals,
potassium, calcium, iron, with traces of zinc and chloride...

The source of my pain is a ghostly landscape,
pulsed with unrelenting traffic that bursts
into the corkscrew branches of trees
and a secret eddy of perversity, flowing backwards.

The curve of beauty
for Stephanie

Day by day a slow withdrawal of strength
from the knee to the hip,
from the hip through the curve of beauty,
the small of a woman’s back,
now unlimber, doll-like, askew.

Rigor stilled neck and jaw.
Speech slurred. Hands would not hold,
mouth would not be fed:
then the humiliation of silence.
In her trammelling flesh she would arch
like a baby crying, mouth stretched,
but I heard only the hissed whisper
of wind in a chimney.

She was afraid of sleeping–
not that she might never wake
but that she might dream–
dream of her old life, stepping out
in the mall, running for a bus...

She fell into sleep as I handled her,
rotating joints, massaging
feet, hands, face, lending her a lifeline
to dip into unconsciousness.

No-one dare say what she felt,
bargaining with an unfamiliar god,
the local priest as wordless as she.
Her need went unanswered
as she died, withered with fever,
eyes that had held all that remained
half shut, lips parted.

I prayed, often. For me, lord,
let it not be like this, not for me.

In the Children’s Ward

"How can you bear to let them touch you?"
–Administrator, Leavesdon Hospital

In a six foot crib,
a man lolls, his head thrown back showing his shaven throat.
Beside him, infants with swollen heads, propped in their high chairs,
their temples rest on terry cloth cushions,
pale blue eyes warmed by the sun in the skylight
unblinking.

A girl floats by on her toes, looks through you as if you aren’t there,
flicks her fingers in front of her eyes,
tears paper into long even strips, lays them on a pile,
going through the empty motions of making.

Sometimes a smile comes,
but there is always the sound crying:
sometimes like paper being torn,
sometimes like a flock of starlings, sometimes
like an old doll being rocked - maaah.