For Dr. Oliver Durand
Leaving that cradle of bed-baths and bells
for the hurrying mothers who summon his childhood
on the helpless enamel, he passes the doorways
again: the sealed, with the masks and the gasses,
where blood learns its interval under a bubble
and the desperate climb their thermometers;
the doors set ajar
for the fear like a colorless smell
in the night-light; the windowglass cages
and graves of the ward-room, where terror lives openly:
the aged in abbatoirs
with the oxes’ albuminous look; the arthritic,
alive in a fright-wig of hair by the turreted
bed-table, among juices and pepperplants-
all that threshold of pathos exploding in chemical rages,
waxworks and madhouse, the paralytic’s magnesium stare,
and the plotted mutations where hazard ascends and descends.
He has watched with the murdered, a casual.
Now
the corridors flow by incurable quarrels,
beneficent sponges, lenses, and dyes,
bearing him back across enemy lines
in a gutter of chloroform, where the innocent,
crouched in the cave of their skulls, on the torch of their spines,
celebrate their abstinence with animal cries.
He would say something, pointing his breath like an icicle,
shamed in his appetites, taking the knife of the snow,
sleepy with certainty.
But already
the shipwrecks sail out on their pillowslips,
small in their bedsheets, unforgiving,
intent on the shore-line that sparkled like salt
in his fevers.
What would he know,
who returns with his hurt to the bran and the meat of the living?
The mothers could gather him back in the night
of their laps and speak of his fault:
but the mothers are locked under needles and crystals.
The car races its motor and guns down the driveway.
The pine smokes in its resins:
needles and crystals.
There is nowhere but light.
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