often you are too expensive, the price
of the medicine closes your clear doors,
and the poor go back, jaws clenched, to the dark room
of staying sick. May the day arrive
when you’ll be free, no longer peddling hope,
and the victories of life, all human life,
over great death will be your victories.
viii. A Joke
A guy goes into a hospital with stage-one
melanoma on his arm, has it removed,
and asks the doctor—Lebanese, from Beirut,
with olive skin, black hair, and wet brown eyes
wild as Ernie Kovacs’s—how to prevent
another cancerous mole. A one-beat pause,
then: Have genes like mine? A break for laughs,
a handshake, and the doctor leaves the room,
the braces on his shoes thumping the floor.
The body is a weight the hospital
can help us lift. And it’s a kind of clock
the hospital tries to read. There are times
preset in your cells, when things will get
interesting: tests in special rooms,
cameras snaked inside you, you inside
a beige machine that magnetizes you
and clanks. How late is it? My turn now?
Even the gorgeous rich who can afford
trainers to help polish their good fortune
have a particular spot in that waiting line
and never can be certain where it is.
ix. Dictionary
Hospital, from hospes, a guest or host.
Neither stays very long at the hospitale,
or inn. Administrators leave at five,
patients are discharged, and doctors zip
between wards and their offices in the world
like scouting bees. The buildings themselves imply
the temporary, with curtains, partitions
instead of walls, and multipurpose rooms.
Wings open up and shut down, entrances
are swallowed as exteriors become
interiors that don’t quite fit, and age
cracks out through paint and plaster till at last
the whole structure is smashed by wrecking balls,
or picked apart, or imploded as we watch
on TVs that might as well be screens
charting our own collapse. The hospital,
then, as heap of rubble, memento mori,
a transient guesthouse housing transients.
x. Sealed Rooms
Sometimes there are unexpected stays—
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