Dear Dr. Williams, Dear Poet
It’s all about pace
planting palms within loamy skin
excavating stories buried deep within bone you whisper
as I bob on the rim of the university bubble
float past preachers and salesmen certain
they have the antidote to disease and famine.
Poem. Steady eye at the hurricane-center
of flu epidemics and cancer clusters
supplication to spare a son or father.
Hours stolen between patients
scribbling poems on the back of envelopes
furtive game of test and balance.
Lay cold metal ear against shivering flesh
listen to the swish of deficient valves
as the anxious heart gallops across open meadow.
My offering is about Carla who bled
whom I’ve left alone inside all those tubes
and wires that need tending
an innocent who didn’t know that the miracle
keeping her heart dancing –pacemaker- could also be dangerous
the reason I arrived cold, wet, late.
Pens carry steady light down into the body’s labyrinth
part and weave incisions bloom with looped handles
grey roses, white gardenias. Into the nether-world
grasp red muscle, yellow fat, between metal teeth
part and weave. You voice in my ear: Never mind
the phone, that mad thing, that curse,
words demand to be born
between claming a man bronzed by leukemia
child pregnant with child.
House still, my son warm in his bed
words blow through leaves calling.
What medicine takes apart
poetry breathes in whole. Knife and pen join hands
take up the dance
whirl and glide, spin face to face
arms encircling arms as they debride scar tissue
excise pendulous tumors
sing lyrical songs a capella
with bell-like harmony of hemostats and knives
wounds healed by a tiny thread of ink.
Next shift Carla’s cheeks are bright peonies
and my poem – dancing its wild flamenco
within her chest – has just earned
the only grade it will ever need.
(from the anthology The Poetry Of Nursing, Kent State Univ. Press, 2005).
