Four Poems

BALANCE

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In the night, we listened for breath,
nostrils flared for the sting of urine, or worse.
We shoved laundry carts draped with linen,
gowns, and towels, passing the sleepers by,
stepping into the rooms and beside the beds
of dreamers with disloyal bladders.

If their sheets were wet, we changed them,
washing their flanks with tepid water, adding
lotion or not, sprinkling their haunches with talc
or not, relieved if only one sheet were soiled.
We rolled the body from side to side, changing
one half the bed, then the other, tightening
the half sheet and spreading the absorbing paper
square backed with blue plastic.

If they lay in soil, if their beds were soaked,
we hoisted them into a chair or slanted them
on a mattress seam to wait, to tremble, to catch
their breath at each uncertain move, unsteady
and fearful. Braced against indifferent bodies,
they whimpered “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,”
or tied their arms about our waists and held on.

IMPACTION

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Wear latex gloves.
The resident can stand, legs
straddled, or curl in bed to one side.

Spread K-Y over gloved fingers.
Push one digit into the anus.
The sphincter will tighten,
its mouth pushed out pouting,
but the muscles will give. Move past, push,
probe. You’ll feel it,
a hard mass or rounded pebbles:
what you’ll pry and pull free,
what you’ll remove.

Push on the stomach, dig it out,
green-lumped, tarry clinging: turn
your nose from the smell.
They may groan. Their hands
may swat and slap, but mostly
they suffer what has to be done.

Use two fingers, push hard.
Do the job, probe, pull, but be careful.
The nurses won’t tell you. No one warns
you that flesh walls tear, that the body’s
boundaries wear away.

No one tells you about the red bright flow,
the serpent that slides from her anus
or about you-with two fangs thrust
up, hissing. Shhhhhhh.

WARDS OF SLEEP

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How soft the soles of aides at night, how
quietly they slip from breath to breath,
lifting waste and weight and waiting through
the hours till morn, weary for home
and wards of sleep, where dreams
arise with stethoscopes and white uniforms.

How low and slumped and shapeless
the woman who waits in her wheelchair
after breakfast, lifting her head
at each approaching step to stare,
like the owner of a sold house gazing
into empty rooms before softly shutting the door.

How still, how still, lies a man when he is dead,
when an aide washes him for the last time,
face, belly, limbs, groin, and back,
steeping her cloth in soap-grey water
and wringing it dry again, urging the lather
across cooling skin, though only the cloth,
only her sleeves and dampened cuffs, only
the muscles of her back and her breath move.

How empty the bed that held someone once
for a year, for two, for five or more,
how taut its sheets, how severe its seams’
geometry. How patiently a bed waits
with linens stripped, mattress turned,
frame newly steamed, steel rails
jerked-hard-into place and locked.

PIETÀ

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She stoops, this should-have-retired
aide, in her polished and re-polished
shoes and white uniform, lifting
this fetaled shape, the body
of a wordless man who only groans,
his eyes startled into clear ice.

His blue-milk skin, blue-veined
and blue-bruised, eases against her chest.
His brow leans into her shoulder. His lips
press her uniform’s rough pleats and leave

damp wings traced in spittle above her breast,
though she does not notice and, straining,
bears the weight as the years have taught,
her knees bent, back levered into straightness,
breathing in, breathing out, muscles tight.
She lowers him as you would lower an over-
filled basin, settling its shallow wash gently,
leaving even the refracted light undisturbed.