Third Place Winner, December 2001 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, December 2001

HOSPITAL TIME
Phil Stinson
(Cafe Utne)
To David
In this house we talk and cry
hammer out what we need to discover
stumble in from green hospital walls
try to sleep at odd hours
learn about the Shadow.
A cliché -- “the Shadow of Death.” Here's the rub...
It is here.

I need something to tide me over
drugs, sex, prayers, alcohol
today moves slow as the doctors deliberate.
You waver on your pillows.
Your eyes are looking off at some ocean.
If you leave, there will be serious problems.

I stand beside you, a Job's comforter

where there are no helpful answers
where any action is unsatisfactory
where no body, however young, is immune.

Beside you in the night terrors and grinding weariness
of even bothering to get through a day.
In the chill promise of mortality
numbing promise of sooner than later

Casting, grasping at straws;
chiropractic, shamanism, holism,
tinctures, astrological influences, Eastern breathing
scorned by doctors with nothing better to offer,
contradictory with veiled, noncommittal eyes

Watching dismayed as the pounds, needed muscle and fat
shrink to recent memory.
I clean your hair from the shower drain every day.

Beside you in silent solitary illuminations;
truths unanswerably implacable,
blinding, indifferent, terrifying,
beautiful, supernatural, hopeless.

Let's make fists of divine unfairness,
raised shaking at nothing in particular,
invoking unknown spirits
falling impotent and trembling

I'm beside you in confusion, weariness, and fear
as only a father can descend with a son.

Let me unflinching burn
these memories within.
I will still try and teach you to dance.

Judge Joan Houlihan's comment: “The poem alternates, as does the father who speaks the poem, between hope and despair, between focusing on necessities ('I clean your hair from the shower drain every day.') and 'grasping at straws, / chiropractic, shamanism, holism, / tinctures, astrological influences, Eastern breathing.' in a way that draws us into the poem with tragic immediacy.”