A Short Explanation of Everything
We sponge her off. This student is learning how blood boils,
how shaking chills and drenching sweats punctuate fever,
along concentration gradients, how nerves talk,
how some circuits turn all
On the Grounds of a Former State Mental Hospital
To red dust. Weeds pierce the interstices of paths slowly
Giving themselves up to trackless overgrowth
Or is this slant just as proper to a cupola as symmetry?
Not if
Whatever Else
from all this–from machines
and plastic tubes, from the shooters
with their dyes, from the guys
who scan your organs
for the truth, from waits in cold rooms
whose lights illuminate your life
and make
Sounds
from its suitcase of slightly sweaty skin
across to the diaphragm, a divide keeping
him from me, now breached, the world now open
crawling up a well-used black rubber tunnel
to my ears, calling to me, waiting to begin
Mortality and Morbidity Conference
I imagined something Victorian.
Perhaps I imagined a lecture hall filled with side-whiskered,
Sherlockian doctors, arguing case histories
like gentlemen playing chess with death–
or perhaps I imagined priests,
performing absolution at the bier.
Last Day
filled with meds both past and present
and read out loud the labels of those we stopped,
why he needs oxygen at night, and the rescue inhaler.
Between pills it’s
Training During the Plague
If you had told me thirty years ago,
when I took call on endless sleepless nights
on incandescent AIDS wards full of fear
on which I tried to do the healing work
of drawing blood and packing leaking wounds
and viewing films of microbes
Holiday Concert
The door opens, we pause again.
Voices singing in the lobby drown out
her parents and the specialists alike.
I think they added bells this year,
the cheerful carols carefully chosen
to celebrate the season, not a faith.
A guitar picks up a riff,
First Saturday Night at the Nursing Home
the limp lettuce, pale tomato
sliver, open the small
I don’t eat mayonnaise.
I pour my milk, set the carton
the red Jell-O. If I don’t look
up, I
Schrödinger’s Patient
Neither dead nor alive,
Until observed.
In three months,
The box opens.
Tested, probed, scanned,
She learns the cancer has recurred,
In which case she is dead.
Or it has not returned,
In which case she
Learning to Live 8.5 Hours From My Autistic Daughter
she said she wanted
every bone in her body
to break.
flirting with the idea of flying,
knowing she admires the flitting of butterflies
from one pollen hive to another
Invasive
I never grew Virginia creeper,
this twining shiny vine rapidly
unfurling its five-leafed bouquet,
yet it crept into my garden, stealthily
wrapping its strong tendrils round
stems and bushes and trees
in lusty demanding embrace,
attaching onto the house foundation,
embedding
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