Thursday Poem

To what degree must you be

completely and utterly cold to someone
to love them usefully?
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In anatomy lab, one group member held the scalpel

while another held the hand.

We did this for a year without realizing
what we had learned.

A dream of both feeling and changing

things for the better
hovers, flutters in the call room. I don’t know
__

what keeps it alive or how it got in here.

The only windows are nine floors down in the chapel,
stained glass against a brick wall.
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Today we pulled sticks and it’s my turn to dehydrate.

My tears emerge from another family’s eyes

           and there is little left to swallow.
“I endorse a history of crying in my car,”
the residents joke,
__

preparing me for the long road.

On the drive home there rises
a cloud of starlings, breathing, wrestling winter

when no other birds remain.

Scrubs doffed, this body is hailed by shower pressure
it remembers how to tremble, clutch, sweat. I confess:

I am not above attachment to attachment.

each vial sent is a prayer, each updated value
a communication from God. If I could return to that
__

room, I’d tell the son, the father, that I

follow her creatinine like an augur,
never signing off or letting go.
___

Sometimes I cannot sit with hands folded,

doling out prognoses, pretending the starlings
never bless these hospital eaves.
____