Pediatrics

When she came to visit me, I turned my face to the wall—

though only that morning, I'd bent my head at the bell

and with the host on my tongue, mumbled thanks.

Cranked up, then down in my bed—

I told the nurses jokes,

newly precocious, but too old

at twelve to be anything

but a patient. I slouched in my robe

among the other child-guests of St. Joseph,

the parrot-eyed scald masks,

the waterheads and harelips,

the fat girl with the plastic shunt.

The old crippled nun on her wheeled

platform dispensed her half-witted blessings,

then was gone like the occasional covered gurneys

sliding by my numbered door. Gone

told me I'd go away too—

orderly as dusk in the brick courtyard:

the blank windows curtained one by one.

I could not abide that yearning face

calling me home. Like the Gauls,

in my penciled translations: I saw

Caesar was my home. Through the streets

of the occupied city, his gold mask rose, implacable.

In the fervent improvisational style of the collaborator—

I imagined pain not as pain

but the flickering light embedded

in the headboard, the end

of the snake-wire uncoiling from

the nurses' station. The painkiller winked

in its paper cup, its bleak chirp

meant respect should be paid

for the way I too wielded oblivion,

staring at the wall till six,

gifts unopened in her lap,

the early dark deepening between us.

Copyright Credit: Carol Muske-Dukes, “Pediatrics” from Applause. Copyright © 1989 by Carol Muske-Dukes. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, http://www.upress.pitt.edu. Used by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Source: An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997)