In The Hospital
© Adrianne Marcus
The doctors speak mainly to one another.
Fretful fevers patients demand
simple answers: Will I live?
How long until I'm well?
The doctors are young. They shake
their heads knowingly. My doctor's
name means silkworm. I want to offer
him mulberry leaves, bits of useless
information. Fresh out of Harvard
he has an eastern, benign
voice, asks impossible questions:
Age, weight, are you sexually active?
I ask him to define active.
His consort, a scholarship student
is harsher, much more abrupt.
They practice death on the changing
bodies. On each other.
Down the hall a senile woman screams
Don't touch me, don't touch me.
The Irish nurse comes into my room
shakes down her thermometer, shakes
her head, says, as she inserts the
measure of my heat, cutting off answers,
It's a shame to prolong life that way.
I must still deserve attention as she
takes my blood pressure, charts my pulse.
After four days, I am released from isolation
walk down the narrow corridor outside the rooms.
Each cubicle is like passing an accident, as I slowly
cruise by. I look in, then away.
Back in my own room
I hear her moaning again, softer,
do not touch me. She is talking to
doctor death.
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Alphabet of Love
© Adrianne Marcus
1.
Sitting in the car,
our fingers linked,
we talk softly
of unimportant things;
yesterday, tomorrow,
the day ahead. Just
behind us is the border
of the bay; waves curling,
falling, retreating
in the night. Their
language, linked
and tentative
as ours.
2.
Pink streetlights
flood the distant
darkness up ahead.
Studies prove
these high
intensities
deter most criminals.
Outside their arc
they do not show
how a heart is
stolen
or: which of us is thief.
3.
Each of my fingers ends in
a tiny Christmas bulb. You
kiss my hand--immediately
the nails light up
one at a time, trying
to spell out, illuminate
your name.
4.
Driving away, I wanted to
look back, see you still
standing there. Instead,
I kept my eyes fixed
on the road. Tried not
to think of you.
I turned on the radio,
but you had written all
the lyrics to those
songs. Finally, miles
away, I did look back;
saw the city
brilliantly alive
behind me. I thought:
There. There. Where
you are. And
continued driving,
on, into my dark
uncrowded night.
5.
Today, I promise myself
a new beginning. No
worrying or waiting, this
time. Why then, do I
startle, each time
the phone rings.
Why, when you call, does
your voice begin to
sound like mine: hesitant,
alive, and new.
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April, Virginia
© Adrianne Marcus
Huge white flakes
hang in the air.
But this is April, I say, and besides
the trees have already begun
their brazen announcement
Spring! yesterday.
Like false dawn
that grey hour
before
the actual sunrise
a glimmer of pearls
when you rise up
out of night dreams
and find your destination
false, in the thin darkness
the snow
has stopped but
the skies are still
full of it;
the air, heavy
with suspended crystals.
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Breakfast With Strangers
© Adrianne Marcus
At breakfast, we are less than human.
I learn to use my hands, placing them
Around the coffee cup, just so, and
Bring the blackness up into my throat.
There is a bottom to this cup. Before
It's emptied, I will fill it up, dissolving
The tight-walled sugar, the faint sweet
Cube into the steaming dark. Cup by
Cup, the morning comes alive, my voice
Returns and fits my life. I say,
Good morning, fellow travelers,
Are you healed, ready to disembark?
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Der Rosenkavalier
In memory of William Dickey
© Adrianne Marcus
Wherever you are, there is opera. How you
Loved Rosenkavalier, as the Marschallin
At the end is left only with her sadness
Of desire, the heart breaking to music in a grand
Soaring voice. So many
Years gone now, and still I can hear you
Rippling with laughter, a contained passion
In your poems, the acts of consonants, vowels,
With images grand as Dukes, a kingdom of trumpets.
Memory: you, seated at your rolltop desk,
As word by word you made language sting,
The voice of Maria Callas in the fury of Medea,
The great pyramid reaching into the sky,
And her final reckoning, borne away on a
Chariot, gold as the burnished sun.
Then, silence. The voice ends
And the room is once again simply a room.
Now the years play out, a delicate feast of hours,
Days, each one filled with the
Memory of loss grown more silently solid
Than that of everyday life.
What is music but desire to send the
Voice into vacancies it can no longer bear?
And then loss: the stage empties,
And the notes glide into the welcoming dark.
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