LITMIR.BIZ

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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—

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