Love Notes from the Dayton,
Ohio ER
Ohio ER
Even with perforated eardrums
I can hear you cursing
through the curtain between us.
I see four police legs, hear
You shouldn’t let her do this to you, Tom,
and I know, I know.
Then How did she put a knitting needle through your leg like that?
You say, She bit me too then confess
you’d thrown a chair at her
and she’d bitten you because
you’d pushed her against the piano.
I don’t want to see you in here again,
the doctor says after she’s stitched you up,
given you tetanus shots, you still sputtering,
But I love my wife, I love her.
The doctor looks at the black blood
oozing from my ears. She says to me
No flying home, hear me? You drive instead,
and all I can think about the long way home
is your thin mustached face, freckles,
and that silver spike bristling in your thigh.
Reading Portents in Suburbia
We could sure use some good news
you say without irony
as you trudge upstairs
(three divorces, three disappointments
three small scars.)
They say omens come in threes –
three crows on the windowsill,
three dead lilies in a vase,
three trash cans disappearing.
You look forward to the mail
as if salvation will arrive, glowing,
in an envelope. A check to pay the mortgage,
a letter from a long-lost lover,
a sample of Proctor and Gamble shampoo –
any sign things will get better.
The Husband Waits
I am used to waiting for her.
My head tilted back,
I can always see her
out of the corner of my eye –
she has her head thrown back, laughing,
probably telling a joke to the others,
because she’s making those broad gestures
with little hands like white cranes.
Now I wait for her in the green light
of the hospital post-op room.
Doctors and nurses keep coming out,
saying to other waiting men,
“Everything went fine.”
No one says this to me.
Two hours into a “ten-minute” surgery
her doctor comes out,
Shows me pictures like swarms of bees,
Says something about “too much blood.”
Says something about “irregular anatomy.”
She does not invite me back.
She does not invite me back.
A nurse offers bitter coffee.
My wife said to me this morning
“You can wait ten minutes for coffee,”
so that we can have breakfast together.
Breakfast has become lunch, become dinner.
Before I see her again
I will envy other men whose wives
are returned disheveled but beaming,
stumbling towards their spouses in sweatpants,
floral print dresses, their hair pressed
close to blanched faces.
These men lead women to cars waiting,
steaming impatiently in cold air.
These men walk slowly,
touching the backs of their womens’ necks lightly,
recovering their smell.
The Morning After
She opens her eyes
the dullness of sleep
still on her face
as she blinks
out the window at the curve
of the gull’s wing,
its curve echoed
in the arc of a white sail,
in the arc of a grey wave.
She can’t remember
any dreams save this:
that she would wake
to the blank noise of surf
and the quiet of clams,
to light, Jesus, so soft
it claims heaven in its thin blues
in the undemanding clouds
in the shining of one finger
of sun on dirty water.
Diagnosis
You are 30. You’ve had four surgeries,
take seven pills a day. Listen:
outside the window, life goes on without you
and you expand to fill the house –
you absorb the dust, the noise of the television,
the dim hum of the kitchen appliances.
It is raining today, and the beat of children’s feet
on the walls of your home falls in time
with the drops of water against the window.
One day, you will be able to kick your own walls,
but today, you just listen. Sickness has a way
of separating you from others:
your healthy siblings, or husband, or co-workers,
like a film you can hide beneath.
They stop asking, “How are you” because
your answers are no longer parallel.
You bring flowers inside your rooms,
to smell the outdoors on your skin again,
to get pollen on your fingers.
Everyone has advice you don’t follow.
The doctors keep asking to cut you again.
You take herbs, vitamins, acupuncture.
Your blood cells won’t cooperate.
When you breathe in defeat, with the stale air,
you forget you’re only 30.
Get your hair cut short.
Stop painting your nails.
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Jeannine Hall Gailey
