Mortal Sorrows

The tortures of lumbago consumed Aunt Madge,

And Leah Vest, once resigned from schoolmarming,

Could not be convinced to leave the house,

And Mrs. Mary Hogan, after birthing her fifth son,

Lay bedfast for the last fifty-two years of her life,

Reporting shooting pains that would begin

High in her back and shear downward to the feet,

As though, she said, she had been glazed in lightning;

And also, men, broken on bridges and mills,

Shell-shocked veterans, religious alcoholics—

Leldon Kilpatrick, Johnson Suggs, Whitey Carlyle:

They came and sat there too, leafing through

Yellowing Pageants and Progressive Farmers;

And, one by one, all entered in and talked

While the good doctor gargled a dark chaff

In his pipe and took down symptoms,

Annotating them on his hidden chart—

Numbness, neuralgia, the knotted lymph,

The clammy palms—and then he’d scratch

His temple’s meaningful patch of white

And scrawl out his unfailing barbiturate prescription

To be filled by his pharmacist brother-in-law

Until half the county had gathered as in a lap—

The quantum ache, the mutiny in every house.

How much pain, how many diseases

Consigned to the mythological, the dropped

Ovaries, the torn-up nerves, what women

Said, what men wanted to believe? Part of it

Laughable, I know. Still I want someone

To see, now that they lie safe in graves

Beyond the vacant stores, that someone

Listened and, hearing the wrong at the heart,

Named it something that sounded real, whatever

They lived through and died of. I remember

Mrs. Lyle who called it a thorn in the flesh,

And Mr. Appleton, who had no roof in his mouth.

Source: Poetry (June 1995)