Clinic Wait

Eight thirty the start of the day after

Thanksgiving in the Polyclinic. Silence

without canned music

soothes the room

with no patients. Five sets

of chair arms’ cold gray plastic

embrace mauve cushions that could be

rosy tongues in famished

open mouths.

By the computer behind the desk

a receptionist is crying whispers

and wiping tears into the receiver.

Magazines sport covers,

Gourmet, Money, Life,

stacked from May to November their

advice waits while purple carpet mutes

an occasional whish of white

coat bustling by.

The doctor’s door is closed. Viktor

from Vladivostok, the visiting actor

whose voice animates audiences,

Is in an exam.

He’s hearing

how long he has to wait

till his tissue

deteriorates, how soon

his sojourn will expire.

The Baroness of Ballard

Gentle Brian, at the hospice,

lets light in and gathers-up

the Baroness of Ballard’s hand.

Her frail palm in his big paw

the way his, nested long ago

In hers. He says

everyone around here

Is dying but she is hanging-on.

Christine said, John’s mom

waited hours to consummate

her penultimate goodbye. Slipped off

only after Johnny’s business day

was done. Jessie says her dad

has two days or so to go.

Kay writes that Hugh is hanging

by a thread, and Jan’s mother’s

blood carries clots

slowly toward her heart.

Shoko’s rushing back to Tokyo.

Tell them buds are swelling

on plum trees, softening

thorns turning pink.

Tell them February days

are getting brighter, it’s

the month dark

begins to dissipate.

What Song of Songs?

Did you sing to your baby boy from the Bible you borrowed

as his life throbbed into the dining room rug,

a soft mass of matter? Did you sing psalms not rhymes

nor Vedic chants-- your angelic voice

a cushion to quiet him until he was perfectly quiet?

When you pierced did you cut slowly or slash, the blade

dull or keen, left wrist not right? Did you sing

your own overture before you resumed

bloodletting humming making yourself

not matter, a sticky red sea?

Salzbergwerk Berchtesgaden in Germany

We hadn’t planned to go there that day.

I forget where we were headed but it rained.

Now friends chuckle over our photo.

We’re trussed up in miner’s costumes,

women in white bloomers and men in black.

Everyone wearing black woolen work shirts

and black fez-style caps, dressed alike, speaking

a half-dozen languages.

Smiling, twenty-three tourists straddle

a trolley, sit one after another like scales on a snake.

The tram chugged into the earth.

It was dark, a musty smell and the guide’s voice

reverberating in German, English and French,

the history of salt, common and precious.

We transferred to a banister and one by one, slid 25 feet

on pads, so we wouldn’t burn our bloomers. I remember

standing in a cavernous temple:

the walls, millennia of stratified salt in shades of amber,

lemon and tan. A geology lecture then

but my mind drifted to the diggers denied daylight,

their picks and pushcarts left

so we could touch the very tools

of those who hacked

from shadows lit by lanterns.

At the end we descended

to a grotto, malachite-black and mysterious

water sloshing the walls. “Hitler,

proud of deception, built bombers here”

declared the disembodied voice in German, English and French.

We went back up by elevator.

Let out at last we stood with our faces lifted to the gray rain

and tried to wash away everything.