Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite Poem by Louis Edward Sissman

1

Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,
A vacuum waiting for a rupture in
The tegument, a puncture in the skin,
To pass inside without a password and
Implode us into Erewhon. This room
Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall
An empty elevator clangs its doors,
Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall,
Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air
Outside, a trembling, empty brightness falls
In hunger on those whom it would devour
Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls
And rises silently up the steel stairs
To the eleventh and last floor, where I
Reside on sufferance of authorities
Until my visas wither, and I die.


2

Where is my friend, Rodonda Morton Schiff,
Whose hulk breasts, cygnet-like, the Totensee,
Shrilling her bosun's whistles, piping Death—
The Almirante of the Doldrums in
His black cocked hat and braided cape—aboard
Her scuttling vessel with such poems as just
Escape confounding his gaunt rape with lust?
She should be singing my song at this hour.


3

It is a simple matter to be brave
In facing a black screen with a white FIN—
The final title—fading out as all
Credits have faded in the final crawl,
To which the audience has turned its back
And mumbled, shuffled, struggled into coats
On its way out to face a different night;
It is far harder, in the light of day,
Surrounded by striped student nurses, to
Endure a slight procedure in which you
Are the anatomy lesson in pink paint
Splashed by some master on the tinctured air,
Complete, in gross detail, to the grimace
Denoted by a squiggle on your face
As the bone-marrow needle sinks its fang
Through atomies of drugged and dullard skin
And subcutaneum to pierce the thin,
Tough eggshell of the pelvic arch, wherein—
After steam-hammer pressure—it will suck
Up sips of specimen tissue with a pain
Akin to an extraction under gas,
All gravity against all hollowness.
Affronted and affrighted, I can't pass
This episode in silent dignity
Or bloodless banter; I must sweat and grunt
And moan in corporal fear of corporal pain
Too venial to be mortal, making a fool
Of my lay figure in its textbook pose
(Fig. 1) before these starched and giggling girls
Too young to be let out of simpering school
To meet live terror face to face and lose.


4

Why must the young male nurse who preps the plain
Of my knife-thrower's-target abdomen
With his conversant razor, talking snicks
Of scything into my sedated ears,
Talk also in his flat and friendly voice,
So far from showdowns, on a blasé note
Of reassurance, learnt by classroom rote?
It is that he must make his living, too.


5

If Hell abides on earth this must be it:
This too-bright-lit-at-all-hours-of-the-day-
And-night recovery room, where nurses flit
In stroboscopic steps between the beds
All cheek by jowl that hold recoverers
Suspended in the grog of half-damped pain
And tubularities of light-blue light.
For condiment in this mulled mix, there are
Assorted groans and screams; and, lest repose
Outstrip the sufferer, there is his own
Throat-filling Gobi, mucous membrane gone
Dry as Arabia, as barren of
Hydropsy as a sunburnt cage of bone
Perched on parched rocks where game Parcheesian
(A devil figure, this) went, wended his
Bent way to harvest, for a shekel, rugs,
And pack them back by camel over sands
Of nightmare to transship to richer lands
Where millions of small rills plash into streams
That give rise to great rivers—such wet dreams
Afflict the desiccate on their interminable way
Up through the layers of half-light to day.


6

The riddle of the Sphinx. Man walks on three
Legs at the last. I walk on three, one of
Which is a wheeled I.V. pole, when I rise
From bed the first time to make my aged way
Into the toilet, where, while my legs sway
And the pole sways, swinging its censer high,
I wait to urinate, and cannot make
My mortal coils distill a drop, as time
Stumps past and leaves me swaying there. Defeat:
I roll and hobble back to bed, to the
Refrain of cheeping wheels. Soon the young man
With his snake-handler's fist of catheters
Will come to see me and supply the lack
Of my drugged muscles with the gravity
Of his solution, and I'll void into
A beige bag clipped to the bedside, one of
The bottles, bags, and tubes I'm tethered to
As a condition of continuance.
The body swells until it duns the mind
With importunities in this refined,
White-sheeted torture, practiced by a kind,
Withdrawn white face trained in the arts of love.


7

Home, and the lees of autumn scuttle up
To my halt feet: fat, sportive maple leaves
Struck into ochre by the frost and stripped
From their umbilic cords to skate across
The blacktop drive and fetch up on my shoes
As if including me in their great fall,
Windy with rumors of the coming ice.
Though fallen, frostbit, yellowed also, I
Cannot participate in their late game
But must leave them to hide and seek a place
To decompose in, while I clamber up
Long enneads of stairs to the room where
I'll recompose myself to durance in
A world of voices and surprises, for
As long as Clotho draws my filament—
To my now flagging wonder and applause—
From indefatigable spinnerets,
Until her sister widows, having set
The norms for length and texture of each strand
And sharpened their gross shears, come cut it off
And send me to befriend the winter leaves.