iv. Promise
This is for your own good—no way to say that,
carrying our son back to the hospital
each morning for a week after his birth:
from the freezing car through tunnels (warmer now,
his eyelids starting to flutter, lips to suck)
to a waiting room, an office with a nurse
who jabbed his heel—and you cried, you cried,
my sallow one. No way to tell our daughter
the X-ray machine adjusting its black beak
above her skull wouldn’t hurt. Or that hurt might help,
as in my childhood, when curtains in the gym
were placed so that we couldn’t see the nurse
with alcohol, cotton balls, and fresh vaccine,
the needles in wooden trays like silverware.
We knew one of the boys would pass out,
some girls would cry, in this ritual we performed
one day in fall and again the following year
so we might all escape the iron lung.
Public health. The clinic had marble stairs
and cheerful wood blocks in the waiting room,
a brisk lady doctor, good with children
(dedicated, I’d like to think, not just
shunted off here), whom my mother chose
to give me the earliest vaccinations,
who looked in my ears with a tiny light,
listened to my breathing, tapped my knee,
asked questions, answered those my mother had,
and wrote out the prescription, showing by this
how all of us could meet our needs: the lost
gleaming promise of the welfare state.
v. Media Studies
Hospitals look better on TV,
with hunky interns, music, and tight plots:
the drug-addicted nurse, bubonic plague
a greasy terrorist keeps brandishing
in a vial. Threats, then safety, and the news
at eleven. Now the hospital moves
offscreen a while, a last phase after the shootout
or freeway chase. Heroic-medic scenes
with hospitals in jungles, mountain huts,
bombed-out cities, or field camps on the edge
of the latest rubble-strewn battlefield
add glamour to the show. But who would go
to the hospital in real life, given a choice?
We’re scared of the procedures and costs,
the bad news they may carry—a load of pain
that grows, a narrowed future—so we hide
until the ambulance comes to scoop us up.
A run of tests, intensive care, and then
the quick skid to the slab. Hospitals
keep a special place for this downstairs,
cold storage in the basement, the whole building
a funnel to the morgue. Vertical coffins,
corpse silos, boxes of the grimmest facts,
their towers suggest the long odds stacked against us.
vi. Flags
In the first years after college, friends found work
in towers linked to these: the labyrinths
of medical insurance. Hall on hall
of monitors and keyboards, padded headsets,
and hidden clocks for time-motion studies.
Data on them was being entered as
they entered data. Layers of observation
stacked up like the cases on their screens.
Trying to flag each doubtful claim, as they’d
been trained, they were flags themselves, placed in
between things: a warning left inside
the doctor’s file, extra lid on the pill jar,
bar on the hospital door—part of a dam
diverting the stream of illness and its care
to drive the whirling turbines of commerce.
vii. Compañero
English majors (Systems Managers there),
they never lasted very long. Who would
enjoy having to function as a block
day after frustrating day? I suspect
even the soldiers delaying the ambulance
that carried Neruda to the hospital
in the first days of the coup didn’t want
to tilt up the bed, search it for weapons,
and check the passengers’ papers. The man
was dying, they could see that, and no threat.
Because they followed orders he suffered more.
He had an everyday incurable cancer
and kept on fighting against the blocked-up world
with rage and humor, calling himself the Great
Urinator,
