A Tidings of Magpies

By Meredith Holmes At last I can be with you! The grinding hours since I left your side! The labor of being fully human, working my opposable thumb, talking, and walking upright. Now I have unclasped unzipped, stepped out of. Husked, soft, a be-er only, I do nothing, but point my bare feet into your clean smoothness feel your quiet strength the whole length of my body. I close my eyes, hear myself moan, so grateful to be held this way.

By Jane Kenyon There’s just no accounting for happiness, or the way it turns up like a prodigal who comes back to the dust at your feet having squandered a fortune far away. And how can you not forgive? You make a feast in honor of what was lost, and take from its place the finest garment, which you saved for an occasion you could not imagine, and you weep night and day to know that you were not abandoned, that happiness saved its most extreme form for you alone. No, happiness is the uncle you never knew about, who flies a single-engine plane onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes into town, and inquires at every door until he finds you asleep midafternoon. as you so often are during the unmerciful hours of your despair. It comes to the monk in his cell. It comes to the woman sweeping the street with a birch broom, to the child whose mother has passed out from drink. It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing a sock, to the pusher, to the bas...

People Who Live Near the Hospital   by Tina Kelley Sick ones and survivors look down and see real life going on, presumably unscarred, the tricycle on the lawn, the garage door open, the truck on the highway going under the overpass, emerging on. From the solarium window the scene below looks fragile, cinematic and deaf, a model railroad, an oasis of health, the people there unknowingly blessed by the wishes of those who wait.

Counting Sheep by Linda Pastan Counting sheep, the scientists suggested, may simply be too boring to do for very long, while images of a soothing shoreline ... are engrossing enough to concentrate on. —The New York Times When I reach a thousand I start to notice how the eyes of one ewe are wide, as if with worry about her lamb or how cold the flock will be after the shearing. At a thousand fifty I notice a ram pushing up against a soft and curly female, and for a moment I'm distracted by errant images of sex. It is difficult to keep so many sheep in line for counting— they are not a parade but more like a roiling sea of whitecaps, which makes me think of the shore— of all those boring grains of sand to keep track of as they slip through the fingers, of all the dangers of sunstroke, riptide, jellyfish. The scientists fall asleep lulled by equations, by dreams of experiments, and I ...

Reusing Words by Hal Sirowitz Don't think you know everything, Father said, just because you're good with words. They aren't everything. I try to say the smallest amount possible. Instead of using them indiscriminately I try to conserve them. I'm the only one in this household who recycles them. I say the same thing over & over again, like "Who forgot to turn out the lights? Who forgot to clean up after themselves in the bathroom?" Since you don't listen I never have to think of other things to say.

Letter from a Mental Hospital by Kim Lozano From the heart of an old box of letters I lift a small water-stained envelope. Inside, a note card as thin and brittle as a frozen leaf bears a message written fifty years ago by a woman who shares my name. She delivers no greeting, no sorry to have been away so long. She leaves no record of visitors, rationed cigarettes, group art, or the barren iceberg of treatment. I imagine her listening to the ping of the radiator on a snowy morning, seated in her nightgown and socks by an open window. A bell rings in the hallway but she doesn't move toward her robe or her slippers or her brush. I see myself sitting beside her, reaching toward her dull pencil to place my fingers over hers, hand on hand, gliding over the words, moving like two skaters on a lake tracing the solitary line— Please come get me.

by Jane Piirto the 3-year-old, wanting to know what day it is asks everyday what day it is we tell her Tuesday or Saturday etcetera then she asks what day it will be tomorrow and we go through the naming of tomorrows in order chanting the future like a litany tomorrow is when she wakes up in the morning and when we tell her we'll go shopping tomorrow she remembers yesterday and informs us that it is tomorrow that today is yesterday that therefore the time is always now to do what we plan to do tomorrow please note: photo by Donncha O Caoimh

Sometimes the Air Surrounding Me Is Sudden with Flowers by Ander Monson In the busy machine of the emergency room, I talk with a man whose face is barely face, is mostly laceration—accident-remnant while driving his sister's car that he stole while drunk and drove and totaled. He's glad he didn't kill someone, he says. We are surrounded by: black eyes, blood blisters, broken legs, bruises in the shapes of circus animals, a variety of burns. Eight people have something protruding from their feet— fish hook, glass slab, syringe, syringe, staples (22—!), bolt, real big nail, syringe. At least there are no knives in eyes or gunshot wounds as far as I can see. We watch E.R. on the television above us. They are always resuscitating someone. The crowd cheers when this happens. A man with a fissure in his arm all the way down to the bone sits next to me. This patient is far more patient than I'd imagine, considering the bleeding. I ask him if it hurts and he says sure, what do...

"...I guess we're all one phone call from our knees."

Horizon of Feet by Philip Dacey "I hate dancers. Well, I don't really hate them, but they're not musicians. They just count beats, oblivious to the music. They wouldn't know a theme if it bit them. They're arithmetician-athletes." We're sitting, cooling off, after racquetball, and I've asked the principal flutist of the New York City Ballet Orchestra, Paul Dunkel, to solo in words, to talk about his work. "Musicians are there to serve the music, not vice-versa, as with dancers. Think of us as the composer's lawyers, and our job's to put forward for our client the best possible case. "But playing for dancers we're little more than drummers in a circus, just there to highlight with sound the dog whose trick it is to run and jump through a flaming hoop: drumroll, rimshot. "Likewise, some composers think they're tailors, writing to order. They make the music fit the dancing. Four extra steps? Then add two bars. I call that mu...

In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.

For those who don't know me well, I confess I enjoy blaming as many things as I can on changes in the barometric pressure. It's not quite as romantic and thrilling-scary as voodoo, but it's what we've got a lot of in CinCity. So, grumpy moods, fatigue, the fact that someone buys up all the bottles of our favorite locally made salad dressings, no good movies at my favorite movie theater?? All related to the effects of barometric pressure. The past two weeks have been full of weather drama and snow storm systems, Alberta Clippers, running about the country willy-nilly. Surprisingly, we've had few trauma related head injuries admitted to Neurodramaville, but quite a few Intracerebral Hemorrhages--head bleeds. They are many times the result of high blood pressure. Often cocaine related. The patients we've been receiving, though, are older and have older, fragile, worn-out blood vessels in their head that simply give out and break open. We seem to see more of these ...

XI. by Wendell Berry Though he was ill and in pain, in disobedience to the instruction he would have received if he had asked, the old man got up from his bed, dressed, and went to the barn. The bare branches of winter had emerged through the last leaf-colors of fall, the loveliest of all, browns and yellows delicate and nameless in the gray light and the sifting rain. He put feed in the troughs for eighteen ewe lambs, sent the dog for them, and she brought them. They came eager to their feed, and he who felt their hunger was by their feeding eased. From no place in the time of present places, within no boundary nameable in human thought, they had gathered once again, the shepherd, his sheep, and his dog with all the known and the unknown round about to the heavens' limit. Was this his stubbornness or bravado? No. Only an ordinary act of profoundest intimacy in a day that might have been better. Still the world persisted in its beauty, he in his gratitude, and for this he had most ...

by Franz Wright What is today's date? Who is the President? How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten? What does "people who live in glass houses" mean? Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false? Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? Name five rivers. What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes? How about some lovely soft Thorazine music? If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him? What should you do if I fall asleep? Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps? What is the moral of "Mary Had a Little Lamb"? What about his Everest shadow? Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations? Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence? Should an odd numb...

Wasting away again in Neurodramaville... I think Health Care Reform should involve a "house band." You know, for the therapeutic milieu. Always thinking about what's best for patient care, don'tcha know...

"We're going on a pig hunt. We're going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day! We're not scared. Oh-oh! A pig! A troupe of portly pigs. We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh, no! We've got to go through it!" Going back for two more days in Neurodramaville. Haven't heard yet if any little piggies have come to visit us, but I'm certain we're on high alert for them. Our unit deals with neurosurgical/neurological injuries--which doesn't mean a patient could not additionally have the flu, but more likely those patients would be on the Medicine floors. Visitors are much more worrisome. You know, the folks who come in to see their neighbor's cousin's nephew's girlfriend and bring their carload of school aged children to spread the love. Stay home. CDC recommendations: 1. Wash your hands frequently with hot, soapy water. 2. Cover your mouth and nose when coughing or sneezing. 3. See your doctor-- NOT THE ER -YOUR FAMILY ...

Worst night and day in "the history of the hospital" in terms of trauma admissions. Warm weather brings in all the motorcycle, motor vehicle, unsteady ladder, falling off roof accidents and the continuation of a gang disagreement brings in the gun shot wounds. I'm going to bed. I suggest you all do so. And, stay there:>)

by Robyn Sarah It is possible that things will not get better than they are now, or have been known to be. It is possible that we are past the middle now. It is possible that we have crossed the great water without knowing it, and stand now on the other side. Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now we are being given tickets, and they are not tickets to the show we had been thinking of, but to a different show, clearly inferior. Check again: it is our own name on the envelope. The tickets are to that other show. It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall without waiting for the last act: people do. Some people do. But it is probable that we will stay seated in our narrow seats all through the tedious dénouement to the unsurprising end — riveted, as it were; spellbound by our own imperfect lives because they are lives, and because they are ours.