Hospital Visit

Hospital Visit

--For the survivors

I give her a puppet--an armadillo,
fuzzy and warm, to slip over her hand
in the dark when there is no one near
only time to think and a dark marble of fear
that awakens, pulses deep down in a silent

spot that no one knows but she. Tom,
her husband, died somehow in Viet Nam
and she has kept the pain in that same place
for all these years, has hardly talked
of those deep jungles where his body lay.

The doctor comes and speaks of this and that,
cool and calm, detached: of the mastectomy
to be deferred for chemo, the bone scan positive,
biopsy positive, mestastasis into the bone. Sterile words,
remote from the throbbing space that whispers in her blood.

"Yes, it's raining." I say.
"Yes, your sons are here."

She feels the lump in her breast, a pressure, a weight.
She says "I don't need it anyway. My sons are grown."
She says, "My husband died so long ago. I don't need
to talk about the war." She strokes the puppet. "I want
quiet, rest and peace." A steady stream of visitors troops

into her room, brings sweet flowers with perfume
that palls and mingles somehow with the silent
drip of an IV in her hand. A slow anointing,
laying on of hands: fingers trace a cross with water,
touch her head, but it is not the sacrament of the dead,

only a rite for healing, something to contend with that
central core where dark shapes gather. How hard
it is to be polite, to kiss, to hug, to shake each hand.
"I'm fine," she says. "I only need a little sleep."
She smiles. I take her hand, slip the puppet on.


H. Palmer Hall


Posted over on Palmer's Poems