Читать книгу Immediate Song - Don Bogen - Страница 10

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.

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, inviting Nixonicide.

Pharmacy, church of the desperate,

with a little god in every pill,

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—