Vet's Hospital, Thomaston (1989-90?)

1.

In contradictory directions march the dying
to their future's absence. Some stumble, grab the wall,
others with cagelike walkers uphold their frailty.
The oldest nearly trip themselves, the more robust
walk with the briskness of someone returning to work
or the bank. But there's hardly anywhere to go
except to the emergency exit of the ward,
the course they walk along this lettered wing
so broad they seldom find the place they came from.
Later they will walk the hall like automatons
while the mind that animates their legs flickers.

Having served their country, surely they deserve
the chance to wander from their semiprivate rooms
until a thoughtlessness can alleviate their pain.
As TV lights his silhouette until it bristles,
a nurse's aide before the dying buoys nutrient in a can.
But if the dead part with one last retinal image
to take to the stars, should it be the blue layer
of the game show, final consolation prize on the eyelid?
Even the best sleight-of-hand artist cannot pass on
that happy endings are against the odds. His job
is illusion only, the buoyancy of the can in a flicker.

Cancer's their baby. The life that blooms inside them
tautens their faces, makes them slender, ascetic
as it trenches through their system, puts
its alternative system there, a strangler vine
that thanks its host with little sprays
of edelweiss through a bloody system, a bluish fog.

2.

This lobby isn't a temple of silence, or meant
for the reverence due a museum -- a regular
who complains about everything under the sun
as it rises on his cancer volunteers as much.
He saves reserves of his hate for the dying,
more than for loved ones who just remind him
he comes too often to deserve as much commiseration,
that the radiation ladled him will curb his death
like a pruned bush that will leaf another season.

But over those about to die in hours
the sky seems to darken, like over Calvary
as the loved ones crowd beside the door.
He imagines how an oscilloscope's scanline
mystically straightens, whistles one mantra.
How superfluous he feels when this happens,
like being the regular in a luncheonette
boring the waitstaff with complaints.

Outside the window, other hospital wings
stretch brick sides to foreseeable landscape
that crowds into these netted panes as residue.
March snow melts in slushy tire-tracks
the color of droplets fogging the windowglass,
the walls and sofas grey as in prisons.
Sings all this scenery to the visitor
we are locked in bodies like in vaults.