I left the others in Orthopaedics
Milling about your grandmother’s bed,
And went outside, inhaling impatiently,
Walked past the bone bank, chose a stick
To prod the bare wet beds, went around a shed
To where they keep the rubbish, suddenly
Quiet in myself for the first time in days,
As though I had finally figured out a way

To be. Your grandmother’s broken femur,
The hospital talk, you even, hardly
Mattered to this feeling, based on nothing:
Nothing, and the gray-born allure
Of the empty yard, everyone gone, only
The guard at the gate, down the hill, holding
In his gall against the rain, managing
A Christmas grin for everyone, then cursing

His fate. I always find out where they keep the trash.
Orient myself from there, then work back
Step by step, to what is out of joint,
Skewed, or illegitimate. A bashed
Box, blighted bedpan, eyes that tack
Back and forth without a point,
Composing lists.
The street behind the wall on which I pissed

Was dead. I’d gone up and down it
For a decade. Now, prodding a can
Or two, some fresh orange rinds,
The plunger of a used syringe, and letting bits
Of thought have it out, like drunken Romans
In the Latin of the mind:
I stopped to test a cactus for the figure
Of its leaf: plucked and boiled down, they cure

Cancer. Next to a purple-berried bush
I left the parking lot entirely, went
Back, to berry picking, the methodic
Work of being young, the taste of lust, pushed
In ways that went against the bent
Of need: all the shattered bucolics
Of my youth. Spread out against my soft
Beginnings: the sick, the rent, the coughed-

Up. It’s somehow calming. Walking here
On Christmas day, past the brake and bracken
That seems to threaten the respiratory
Section, branch-scratched windows, an uncleared
Path, remind me of something Russian
I dreamt up, and then missed patiently
All my life: that small birch in front of me,
How all must end in pleasing monotony.


Contents

 Martin

 Earl