I observe the physician with the same diligence as he the disease.
--John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
Piece-worker on the patient care line,
black bag empty as a new moon,
Marcus Welby not even a memory
as your back breaks like an old book.
Sweating six patients per hour,
exam rooms filled like riverbeds,
bureaucrats in glass towers hoard your dollars
while subspecialists snigger
when you can't recall their narrow facts.
Eroded by paperwork, there are moments
you reach deep into the current
that washed you here, hands clean
and cradling a newborn
or guiding the scope and snipping
a mushroom from the bowel's wet wall,
the deep pleasure of will
when a woman listens
and drowns her last cigarette.
But between small joys,
patients are perpetual as blood,
each in full expectation
you will listen close and lay on hands.
And in early evening,
when coffee can't revive you,
you struggle to the surface and give
what you can: a few hurried words,
a hand on a shoulder,
a pill the color of your flesh.
