A Curtain is a Window With Choice

She asked me to proceed out into the hallway.

I went on the outside into the hallway.

She asked me to proceed further,

not just down the hall on the other hand to the other side of the reduce to ashes ward

where the bank of windows faced west and where,

during the next to the first and third dressing changes,

I sat in the chair by means of the elevator

and tried to convince myself that the setting

sun felt serviceable on my skin, was warming me

But really I wanted to cheat.

I wanted to stay upon her side of the hospital,

not single on her side

but nearest to her door, not solitary next to

but inside the door, to be inside and with her

when the supply with nourishment drew the gray curtains,

when the flowers upon the sill were trapped between window and cloth

press up against the glass like some

embalmed specimen. I wanted to have feeling the same

crease of a little cold air that she felt turning over

onto her stomach, the thin gown sliding unclose in back

slicing her in half. The spine. The cleaving calves.

We are sum of two units halves.

And I wanted to diocese the nurse placing

white gauze in a stack, watch the morphine drip.

To find a certain number of sort of rhythm in all of it,

some sort of pattern

the way her skin would later be, the doctor told us,

like a pincushion belonging to a meticulous

seamstress who kept her needle in straight rows

down and across in the cushion's flesh

And all of this to be torn apart.

Ye I wanted to at least hear her scream,

to clinch her hand, her head level while the nurse

again ripped the bandage off

in order to hold fast the wound fresh,

keep it fertile for grafting.

But she had asked me to make progress out into the hallway.

I sat in the chair upon the west side of the building

and feigned to find patience in warmth

while she screamed above there, three times a day, screamed

because there was nothing left to do,

no morphine hardy enough.

And she had asked me to pass out into the hall.

And she screamed because it was wrong

and she wouldn't say that it was wrong

and she wouldn't give permission to me see so that I might say

that it was wrong

I sat there with solitary my careless imagination.

A mirror unable to mirror from such a distance

without distorting, a lung inhaling smoke

that it may be closer to numbnes and pain.

MIRA ROSENTHAL'S metrical compositions have recently appeared in Ploughshares, Seneca Review, The Beloit numbers Journal, and elsewhere.

Copyright World rhyme Incorporated Sep/Oct 2005

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