LITMIR.BIZ

      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

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