Nones: Outpatient

Only two of the divine hours remain unwritten in my series -- terce, nine AM, the start of the workday, and nones, midafternoon, the slump, the cluttered worldly dregs of time. I think an old poem, circa 2001, fits the 3 PM slot perfectly -- a poem I wrote after I saw a group of young men wearing work clothes hugging each other and wailing in the parking lot outside my window at the hospital. I later learned that a fellow worker had died on the job of some awful injury.

I've been too distracted of late to write. Maybe this fits.




NONES: OUTPATIENT


The sound, convulsive, musicless, disturbed
the clinic’s drone of paperwork and care,
and, summoned, we attended. It was woe
that froze our pens and stethoscopes midflight,
a woe so whorled and intimate it seemed
our ears were die-cast complements. And then

it stopped. We knew it would, of course. We knew
the chaplain would sweep down ex machinae ,
ex beeper, cell phone, elevator, stat,
and do whatever thing it is he does,
while we got back to doing all we could,
which isn’t much. And, all that afternoon,

amidst a crowded service of dull noise --
heat’s shuffle through coiled corridors, the cough
and spit of sleet and wind on the gray pane,
the hiss of the flickering overheads, the grave,
determined data rattling into banks --
my ears kept picking up that note of woe,

as perfectly attuned to its long wave
as a maternal ear to one child’s cry.
But then a keener sound crescendoed near,
two sirens bawling in and out of phase,
a lullaby, a ululation, then,
outside Emergency’s tokenless gate,

an ear-from-cosmos splitting unison.