Anatomy Lab

 

She was stretched out naked,

young and blonde,

wild and frightening

 

when the others were so old,

everyone at the steel table

pretending not to notice

 

the fortune of her body.

That first day I sliced off her breast,

scalpel circling round and round

 

the way I might halve a peach,

to study her glistening secrets

with detachment and awe.

 

We explored the deep insertions

where muscle joins bone,

subtracted her face, her arms,

 

plucked ovaries and heart like thieves,

but lost count of the treasures

severed from ourselves.

 

By year’s end, brittle with guilt,

we hovered over our hollow creation,

pretending to look away

 

from the short blonde braid

at the base of her skull

no one had the courage to cut.

 

 

Code Blue

 

I’m running

running the way we all run

toward death,

sprinting through swarms

of Pseudomonas and Serratia,

the din of the soaps,

a demented man’s scream.

 

And I run the code

serene as a monarch,

issue edicts and commands,

infusions, boluses, electric thumps

until I drop the paddles,

bent, breathless.

 

When I raise my eyes,

the body on the bed,

dusky blue, spreads

limp as twilight

on the wintry hills outside,

commuter traffic on the street

choked motionless,

the silent signal light beating

amber, red, green.

 

 

Hospital Food

 

We lower a plastic tray on his ribs

as if food can stop the dying:

cold potato scooped like a snowball,

canned spinach oozing green,

microwaved chicken thigh.

I’ve watched anorectic men clog

N-G tubes with brown rice

and Kombacha mushroom tea,

listened to wives plead

just make him take a few bites,

withstood lectures on macrobiotics

delivered by a Camel chain smoker.

No, I’ve never seen hospital food

stop the dying.

 

Some days, worn and hungry,

I take refuge in smooth noodles

glistening black beans and red chili,

fragrant sips of jasmine tea,

sweet white sesame balls the size of prayers.

And I think about the sick men

dissolving like tailpipes in the sea,

what they long to devour,

how we die without appetite

and the way we live with hungers

that consume our hearts like another kind of dying. 

 

 

Learning the Shapes

 

Five students

wear short white coats,

pockets bulging notecards,

tuning forks, new stethoscopes.

Demanding consent

we snap on latex gloves,

smear our index fingers with K-Y,

turn them over, spread them apart

and enter alone, one by one

to learn the shapes inside:

smooth chestnut, soft orange,

stone in a muddy field.

After wiping off the jelly

we wash our hands clean,

examining fingers sensitive

as a blind bluesman

who hears each note

an instant before

touching a tight steel string.

 

 

Open You Up

 

The smile was fear.

20 pack-years and a few month's cough --

a steelworker from Gary,

X ray lit with a lesion

round and opaque as a silver dollar.

I wanted to tell him,

to pull the curtain around us

and sit beside him on his bed,

to break the news

soft as a surgeon's hand.

 

But I swaggered and stood

like a half-drunk general:

You've got something in your chest

and we've got to open you up.

I can't remember his response,

just the flame in my cheeks

and our meeting months later,

his face the color of fly ash.

So much bone when he hugged me

like my father before he died,

the emptiness in my chest,

something opened up, forever.

 

 

Sleight of Hand

 

Old as my grandmother,

she smiles up at me,

breath gentle and lulled,

her fears distracted

by my questions and patter.

I percuss her chest,

listen to her heart,

my style cool and entertaining

as any close-up magician

until I palpate her breast,

feel her flesh

like decayed leaves crushed

by time to a star of coal.

My fingertips define the borders,

sweat beads under my arms,

thoughts flash ahead

to the incision's red arc,

the yellow bottles of poison.     

Her laughter breaks my trance:

You should have seen them when I was younger.

Oh for a stronger magic,

that I could wave my arms

and reach deep inside

my white coat pocket,

the mass vanished,

my hand a heaven of diamonds

over her generous breasts.

 

Cutting Toenails

 

After I slipped

my finger inside and felt

death’s rough stone

I knew I should grant

the old man’s wish:

Just cut my toenails. 

Down on my knees

I admired them, thick

as a silver dollar,

long and curved as

the shofar, the ram’s horn

Jews blow on judgment day.

And I was dressed in white

like Yeshua, Jesus, my favorite

Jew, a healer I knew

would have been down

on his knees with me,

worshipping the beauty

of an old man’s body.

 

I filled a vessel

with warm water,

soaked the nails soft,

washed the cracked

and calloused flesh,

and with my surgical steel

scissors cut sharp brown

crescents, like slivers

of a harvest moon,

imagining Yeshua,

what he atoned for

on Yom Kippur,

what pain he felt

for people he had not healed,

the expression in his eyes

when he heard the shofar’s song

flying toward heaven.

 

 

Teaching Rounds

 

His hand is a farmer’s hand,

nails outlined with crescents of black

earth, skin calloused, tough as a paw.

With one finger he traces the wound

we plowed from sternum to pubis,

flicks the sharp tips of snipped catgut.

We all know what was buried inside.

His movements remind me of an afternoon

on the bank of the Li River when

I stroked the gray bark of an ancient

banyan tree, the sound of water flowing

below me, the wind brushing a beat

in the bamboo leaves.  When I come back

the patient is crying.  Our Attending answers

a routine page, an excuse to leave. 

In the corridor, he demands a confession:

Who peeled back his bandage?

Who let him look?  “It was the wind”

I want to say, “And the river,” but

I keep quiet, eyes on his scrubbed fingers.

 

 

The Cellist

 

When Verdi's Requiem ends

we gather our empty bottles

and unfinished loaves to carry them

back to our dew-covered car.

That’s when I see a couple

I consulted with fifteen years ago,

stopped for a rest on the long walk

through the parking lot. I notice

her legs, mottled blue and streaked

with bright slashes of red,

as if an angry sunset

had been grafted to her calves.

And I remember her husband

filling her syringe with insulin,

his beard faded now to white.

Tonight their eyes meet

with the spirit of sacred music,

her body held between his legs

like a cello, one hand stroking her neck,

his arm curled around her waist.                                                 

 

 

Wounds                                                          

 

Each wound contains

its own beauty—

 

blunt trauma indigo

walled below pale blue eyes,

 

the gashed leg

filigreed with blood,

 

an abdomen scored

by a surgeon’s blade

 

each layer yielding

with its own sigh,

 

the biopsy site healed

in a straight red line.

 

Each wound speaks

its own language,

 

every incision, slash,

cut-down and scar

 

in this hospital where

bruise is not a metaphor.

 

Here the body’s art

conspires with destruction,

 

and violence surprises

with beauty so intense

 

the eyes of all beholders

must learn to be blind. 

 

 

© Richard M. Berlin

http://www.richardmberlin.com/