Immediate Song. Don Bogen
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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—