What the Intern Saw Poem by Phillis Levin

I

He saw a face swollen beyond ugliness
Of one who just a year ago
Was Adonis
Practicing routines of rapture:

A boy who could appear
To dodge the touch of time,
Immortal or immune—
A patient in a gown,
Almost gone.

II

In the beautiful school of medicine
He read about human suffering,
An unendurable drama
Until the screen of anaesthesia
And penicillin's manna.

But now, in myriad sheets
Of storefront glass refracting evening's
Razor blue, in a land of the freely
Estranged from the dead, he meets
That face and fear seizes his body.

III

His feet have carried him to bed.
He thinks he must be getting old
To so revise
His nature and his plan.

He shuts his eyes
And in his sleep he sees a gleaming bar,
The shore of pain.
It isn't far.
People live there.