ensure

My grandmother posted on facebook tonight that she had cookies and Ensure for dinner.  First, I laughed. Then, struck by the reality of the situation, I cried.

Dear Mark,

Ten minutes off the top of my  head. Ok. I can do this.  Thank you for making me stretch in public. 

To your question:  Yes. 

Sometimes I do feel bad because I don't think of my patients beyond the moments that I'm with them.  I am a paper bag and they are a torrent, a waterfall my thin brown paper skin can not contain.  I care - I do! Genuinely! - standing over them, helping them undress, asking them about their childhoods and grandchildren as I pierce their flesh, the bevel of my needle always pointing up.  When I walk away, I usually don't blink.  I've got plenty of my own sad shit, you know?

There is one woman who never leaves me, though.  During sleepless nights I imagine her on H Street and wonder if she's safe or if her baby  (a girl) is still alive.  My prayers for her are simple: a coat, enough food, please Lord don't you let her walk in front of the X2 barreling toward Benning Road late at night.  She stumbled through the door at 18:50, I picked up her chart at 18:57.  It was a Thursday.  A man was waiting for me. I'd made chocolate mousse for dessert.  My skin was clear and the sky was pink and yellow.  We were poised to be young and beautiful. I almost put down the chart.  Nobody keeps triaging through shift change.

It took her a few minutes to gather up her baby and all the plastic bags, to cross the lobby and fall into the chair in my triage room.  I don't know why I didn't put down the chart.  The appeal of saving the world left when my adopted brothers moved in long long ago.  That's not my downfall.  Chest pain, breast pain, stomach pain, itching.  The bottoms of her earlobes were split in two where someone had yanked the gold hoops down through the flesh. She'd found duct tape, pieced them together. She'd pierced her new grey flesh. Her gold hoops were back where they belonged.

That was 13 minutes, but only because I looked up the medical term for earlobe because it bothers me how much I've forgotten, the things I forget.

As ever,

kathryn

definition

guy 1  (g) n. A rope, cord, or cable used to steady, guide, or secure something.

Lord Knows Best

that I don't give a damn

about anyone but you. 

I forgot my shirt at the water's edge

The first night swim of the summer.

The moon a perfect lonely arc, a bracing shot of bourbon against the midnight air,
and everyone asleep apart from me and the guy playing old Springsteen down at the fish camp,
far beyond the dark edge of the deep end.

June

It rains and rains and rains.  

The wrong things grow. The wrong things die. 

I still need to lean to/somebody I can sing to

empty to full

 

 

 

Yesterday

what hooks are

The colors come when the life-giving water and chlorophyll take their green wet business elsewhere, the leaves turn ghost, and we're left looking at shades -- shades of minerals, sipped in secret from the earth all spring and summer.  But what the botanists never tell is: who told the alder and the vineleaf growing side by side on a single ridge each to sip, separately, only the minerals that would turn their leaves dull gold, or blood red? And who told the neighboring firs never to die for the sake of a change of season? And who told the vineleaf and alder always to do so, but only for the sake of the change men call October? What the botanists never tell is why each tree, leaf and needle obey.  Not that botanists are at fault in this -- for mustn't it be that same who they failed to tell of who decreed what a botanist would and would not know? Decreed for example that they would know the phylum/genus/species of any plant a man might hope to see; decreed for example that they would not know why the dying leaves of the tree called "vineleaf maple" must turn the same blood red as the once-silver salmon that journey up the Tamanawis to give birth and die -- and at the same time of change: October; decreed for a final example that they would extend their analysis no deeper than to discuss the effects of water on the mineral Iron to explain why leaf skin, salmon skin, palm-of hand skin must be made scarlet in order to reach the ends they must reach.  Nor may a botanist wonder, within the confines of his discipline, what those ends are, or why they seem to be reached only by those who suffer, who know pain, and who learn in pain that it is this scarlet end and only this scarlet end that can free us from pain.  "So it is Iron?" I ask my Friend as we walked, "is it Iron that gives the blood its beautiful color ? And to learn to love that color will I somehow be wounded as Nick was wounded, and so come to know what hooks are, what they are, what they really are?"

David James Duncan, from The River Why

little heart

My brother is tall, rangy, thinks he knows most everything. 

His wife is tall, lissome, understands things without being told. 

Together they have made this tiny creature who seems both

to know and understand everything already --

who takes it all in -- even while his eyes are closed.  

Goodbye is too good a word, Gal.

Henry & me

Like a Man Eating Shark

WPA poster 1936

the short list

ceteris paribus...

Oxford, Mississippi
Cheyenne, Wyoming
Las Cruces, New Mexico
Bend, Oregon
Portland, Maine

Doc...I mean...Nurse Holliday

While I've often imagined living the life of a tragic 19th century European painter's muse, never suspected that I'd actually die of consumption like one.  Waiting for culture results of my least favorite bodily fluid - sputum - to determine if it's actually TB like the CT scan suggested or just a severe atypical multi-lobe pneumonia.  If it is the dreaded disease, look for me in Tombstone with Wyatt & the boys because I'm your huckleberry.

wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme

It’s time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing
It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going

Broken skyline, movin’ through the airport
She’s an honest defector
Conscientious objector
Now her own protector

Broken skyline, which way to love land
Which way to something better
Which way to forgiveness
Which way do I go

Time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing
It’s time to move on, it’s time to get going

Sometime later, getting the words wrong
Wasting the meaning and losing the rhyme
Nauseous adrenaline
Like breakin’ up a dogfight
Like a deer in the headlights
Frozen in real time
I’m losing my mind

It’s time to move on, time to get going
What lies ahead, I have no way of knowing
But under my feet, baby, grass is growing

Under a Certain Little Star    

by Wislawa Szymborska 
translated by Joanna Trzeciak  

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken. Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own. May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker. My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second. My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first. Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home. Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger. My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss. My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning. Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes. Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water. And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage, staring, motionless, always at the same spot, absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed. My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs. My apologies to large questions for small answers. Truth, do not pay me too much attention. Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me. Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil. Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom. My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere. My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman. I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me, since I am my own obstacle. Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and then labor to make them light.