I
ON HOSPITALS
i. Grounds
The old ones held a varnished elegance
like mansions, cruise ships, or resort hotels—
quiet places, formal, set apart.
You dressed up when you visited. The ease
of a leisured past gleamed in their rooms:
the vaulted lobby with mahogany desk,
mail slots, and leather chairs where I waited
with my father for my sisters to be born;
the long, open TB porch in the Harz;
or the solarium at Cowell where my wife
had mono as a student. Each morning
she’d wake to cortisone and fresh orange juice,
a view of campus in the lifting haze:
damp redwoods, eucalyptus, and the steam
of coffee rising from a china cup.
ii. A Run
Taxpayer opulence, generous care—
a quaint nostalgia, I know, no room for it
now everything is sleeked-down, corporate,
high-tech: medical centers with landscaping,
tasteful signage listing doctors as groups
and associates, intricate as law firms.
The buildings themselves have shrunk, reproduced,
and spread out into complexes, like the one
I run through sometimes: a hospital village
suffused on Sunday mornings with village quiet.
I pass the closed clinics and rehab centers,
construction sites abandoned for the day,
garages almost empty, night nurses
slumping at the bus shelter in scrubs
like washed-out pajamas. Few visitors
at this hour—but once I saw a boy
walking behind his mother, in new shoes,
bow tie, and stiff blue suit, carrying a rose.
It snags the heart, that helpless love of the child
who fears the parent may leave too soon, helpless
parent afraid to leave the child too soon
(it is always too soon). The hospital
holds these feelings like a theater,
an album flush with memories, a brain.
iii. Rooms
There are rooms for arrival—the green-tiled vault
where our daughter met the world, the lustrous hall
buzzing with student doctors for our son—
and rooms for departure, with their tanks and screens,
tangled nests of tubes, and endless humming
as if you were inside a clock. When age
thumps on your heart, thickens your blood, they need
for you to drink this grayish milkshake now.
Here is a cap for your newly bald head,
a gown that ties in the back where you can’t reach.
Your IV stand, a frail hat rack on wheels,
will accompany you—slowly, slowly—
to the awkward bathroom. Everyone here
is nice but distant, everyone in these rooms
is tired but cannot sleep. Because you’re old
you are a child again, like everyone here,
taking your medicine from a little cup,
trying hard to figure out how to please.
