The night I woke to find the sheets wet from you,
like a man cast up on the beach,
I hurried you off to the shower to cool you down,
dressed you, the garments strict and awkward in my hands,
and got you into a taxi to the hospital,
the driver eyeing us from his rearview mirror--
The blue tone of the paging bell,
the green smocks, metal beds,
plastic chairs linked
in a childhood diagram of infection,
and when they wheeled you by
there was a needle in your arm,
the bruise of this
already showing itself,
and rather than watch gloved doctors handle you
in their startling white coats and loose ties,
I took a seat outside and waited,
time yawning, thick and static--
and made clear to me in the bright light of speculation
was time's obstacle in the body,
and those things I could do that might cushion it.
Heck of a run on sentence.
ReplyDeleteI don't get what happened to the second person in the poem, the you POV. Overdose?
The ending appeals to me. How to stop, "Time's obstacle in the body?" Does the narrator want to cushion aging or time? Time is such a cool idea. I heard a physics talk about time and whether it is an actual part of the universe or just a perception of being human. He said the fact that we evolved to perceive time could be an indicator of its existence. Why else would e need to sense it if it wasn't there? But our senses are pretty unreliable...