Poems written on the back of prescription pads are common in the pocket of Catharine Clark-Sayles’ white coat as she moves from hospital to office to nursing home.

Naming: Gross Anatomy

As to naming, we were given no instruction;
one diener said Don’t, another Everyone does.
Professor Ernst went on explaining ligaments,
how they differ from tendons and must not be mixed.

In the gross-lab each body toe-tagged, numbered,
nameless and Paul, our most brilliant, best with a scalpel
insisted that names were sentiment, not science.
But within weeks he was calling his man TC –
The Cadaver for muscles on tests, pumped
into sculpture, knuckles tattooed LOVE and HATE.

Or the woman we named Bertha who taught
the greasy velvet of fat, how it clings and slicks.
Mary with her twisted, useless hands and pink-
polished nails lying next to Hollow Joe, unremarkable
outside his skin, but lungs like stretched-out balloons.
Love for cards and women in Jack’s multitude of tattoos.
Tiny Tina who, from the pale circles, must have loved rings.

In that room of anonymous flesh, we named
vessels like rivers and branching nets of nerves,
made them ours. We learned the heft of a heart,
how it fills a palm and left our names the way tourists
leave comments in guest books, surprised years later to find
the same words sketched in veins under our skins.

Expectations

On the phone the coroner,
too cheerful for 5AM, still night
and cold, asks and I say Yes,
an expected death. Meaning
you expected abstraction –
someday, not soon – after
the new house lost its newness,
after your daughter’s daughter had arrived,

after wrinkles and dentures and silver hair.
Now you have no hair and your daughter
expecting errors from the doctors
wants to hand out blame. Already
she is expecting her own first lump.

John, beyond your expectation,
stayed. You thought he could not love you
as he distilled whatever he might feel
into careful drops of morphine
measured against the pulling of your breath.
I expected more control, but this call

expected since the gray smudges
appeared on your scan (and its always 5 AM,
always the hour when life expects the least).
The voice on the phone asks if I will sign,
as if any of this would be erased if I said No.

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Goats

A long day of electronic subversion, seven
computer crashes in the last hour, the phone blinks
incessant missing messages which the repairman
can’t explain and tech support says “M’am your
new TV is haunted” as it clicks on unasked at 3 AM.

Boiling on the edge of rant, I walk through the ER
parking lot--one last call before home.
Summer night, cooling, as Scorpio wheels
across the southern sky the hill rings with metallic
clangs answered by bleats: Maaa!  Maaa!
 
We’ve got goats: billies, nannies, kids

hundreds moving over the near-vertical
slope, their munching the sound of a distant sea.
A gift of pure hunger simplifies this day,
shakes loose bubbles: something
like laughter, something like tears.

Holding
for Pat

I ask you is there anything you want
when you say I want to live I skip a breath
as if I’d fallen hard. You say I’m sorry,

I’m not good at this as if death is a skill anyone learns.
I want to say you should shout, rage, sow salt
across your pillow top but I take your hand

watch the slow meander of morphine-soaked
thought slip away from the one, enormous thing
to distraction: wills, insurance, who will take the cats.

Hiss of oxygen, click of IV, all the useless trappings
I’ve hung around your bed, being human and unable
yet to find acceptance in the sway of trees

outside the window and the patch of sun
that tracks the minutes across your floor.
For a fierce and timeless moment I pray:

for miracles, for gentleness, for folding in.
We sit in silence and when you shake with tears
there is nothing but to hold you until the end.