On the Subject of Doctors

I like to see doctors cough.

What kind of human being

would grab all your money

just when you're down?

I'm not saying they enjoy this:

"Sorry, Mr. Rodriguez, that's it,

no hope! You might as well

hand over your wallet." Hell no,

they'd rather be playing golf

and swapping jokes about our feet.

Some of them smoke marijuana

and are alcoholics, and their moral

turpitude is famous: who gets to see

most sex organs in the world? Not

poets. With the hours they keep

they need drugs more than anyone.

Germ city, there's no hope

looking down those fire-engine throats.

They're bound to get sick themselves

sometime; and I happen to be there

myself in a high fever

taking my plastic medicine seriously

with the doctors, who are dying.

by James Tate

Trapeze

See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.

O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.


by Deborah Digges

from "Auschwitz and After"

I used to call him my young tree
he was as handsome as a pine
the first time I saw him
his skin was so soft
the first time I held him
and all the other times
so soft
that thinking of it today
is like not feeling one's mouth
I used to call him my young tree
smooth and straight
when I held him against me
I thought of the wind
of a birch or an ash
when he held me in his arms
I no longer thought of anything.


by Charlotte Delbo

Elegy for Thelonius

Damn the snow.
Its senseless beauty
pours a hard light
through the hemlock.
Thelonious is dead. Winter
drifts in the hourglass;
notes pour from the brain cup.
Damn the alley cat
wailing a muted dirge
off Lenox Ave.
Thelonious is dead.
Tonight’s a lazy rhapsody of shadows
swaying to blue vertigo
& metaphysical funk.
Black trees in the wind.
Crepuscule with Nelly
plays inside the bowed head.
“Dig the Man Ray of piano!”
O Satisfaction,
hot fingers blur
on those white rib keys.
Coming on the Hudson.
Monk’s Dream.
The ghost of bebop
from 52nd Street,
footprints in the snow.
Damn February.
Let’s go to Minton’s
& play “modern malice”
till daybreak. Lord,
there’s Thelonious
wearing that old funky hat
pulled down over his eyes.


by Yusef Komunyakaa

Elegance

No elegance is
ascribed to sweat: dripping from
the carpenter's nose

onto the clean ply-
wood. Yet I recall in my
big sheepskin how I

sweated in the snow,
heaving the axe and peavey,
and how sweet it was.

And how jubilee
cried in jay-song to the gray
sky, and the white owl

sailed on extended
wings unerringly among
the snow-clad spruces.

by Hayden Carruth

Autopsy in the Form of an Elegy

In the chest
in the heart
was a vessel

was the pulse
was the art
was the love

was the clot
small and slow
and the scar
that could not know

the rest of you
was very nearly perfect.


by John Stone