I C U
No warning fever.
Just the dull day’s end
of a too-small job.
I couldn’t catch my breath
on the top step
at my own door.
Intensive care.
My beloved masks himself
to enter my room.
Have you ever felt toxic?
I am Lady Phosgene
and I eat men like air.
There’s longing for you.
Still dressed, I swing my feet
at the side of the bed.
The doctor muffles out a pint
of fluid in the pleural space.
Drain, culture, specify. Meanwhile
we carpet-bomb with penicillin.
He ventures:
I think we’ve caught it in time.
Here’s a tip, girls.
Don’t schedule your fall
pneumonia crisis
just before Halloween.
For one thing, ICU psychosis
is bad enough
without nurses in costume.
The angel of death
sounds like Bart Simpson
in the family waiting room.
At last there’s fever.
Slammed with antibiotics,
my body finally fights.
At least
I’m out of quarantine.
The sweats and chills take hold,
my lover paces
or grips my hand.
After all this technical exposition,
we play a scene
from any nineteenth-century
novel, scripted:
Miss Dashwood,
give me an occupation.
*
Don’t you see?
That nurse yes Sarah I think
and the lank resident,
switching meds.
They think I don’t see but I do:
pink and yellow pills
shuffled under dosage cups
like peas and shells.
Mountebanks!
Let those murderers near me
and I’ll kill you.
If you get cold feet —
I do —
demand Chinese
stable temperature shoes.
This is a sort of high-tech
new product,
not used any battery.
Intelligent to keep stable
warm degrees.
Top quality flying shoes.
Both let you walk normally
and can slide as flying!
There is a moth in my chest.
*
It’s true, there’s some part
of you that hears
and sees as from outside.
I hover.
Septicemia, heart membrane
inflamed,
fibrillation.
They let him sit by me
against all regulations.
While he’s there I know
I haven’t fallen
off the world.
Staring at the monitor,
he scries the line.
Give me an occupation …
While he waits
he makes rash promises.
Pledges to read my favorite books.
When I was sturdy
he left them to me —
my attributes.
Now I could rub off
as easily as scales
from a moth’s wing
and he wants to know
what makes up my mind.
It’s sweet but terrifying.
Stroking my hand he feels a change.
She’s converted, he shouts.
It’s sinus rhythm.
The attending says Where the hell
did you learn to read an EKG?
I must be hearing with my own ears.
The nurse wipes my brow
with a damp cloth.
Above the bubble and susurration
of four liters of oxygen,
that voice I’d know anywhere —
Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood,
or I shall run mad.
* * * * *
Asked for a Voice Recording
What life doesn’t shrink
before an hour of blank tape?
It’s eerie comfort to have
proof you’ll treasure me:
thy voice like honey,
thy words as riches laid up.
I keep the recorder ready
for a good day — ten minutes
without a coughing fit.
A modulated voice
must be the last vanity
of woman and professor equally.
Another little reason for delay.
Margaret, you are grieving
too soon. I told you in advance,
as much to convince myself
as you. Now in the mirror
of remission, this summing-up
startles me. More than the chest tube
seems too familiar. Yet outside
my window the summer maple
shades reflection and you know
I love a story. Oh Margaret,
will all these words help?
* * * * *
A note on the poems: “Asked For A Voice Recording” and “ICU” are elegies for my wife, a literary scholar and novelist, who for ten years lived with, and died of, a rare and incurable form of TB. From a series entitled Sorrow, Stay after the John Dowland lute song, the two poems assume her voice and speak from a period of secondary infection and remission. — Randall Couch