A Curtain is a Window With Choice

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2005 by Rosenthal, Mira

She asked me to go out into the hallway.

I went out into the hallway.

She asked me to go further,

not just down the hall but to the other side of the burn ward

where the bank of windows faced west and where,

during the second and third dressing changes,

I sat in the chair by the elevator

and tried to convince myself that the setting

sun felt good on my skin, was warming me..

But really I wanted to cheat.

I wanted to stay on her side of the hospital,

not only on her side

but next to her door, not only next to

but inside the door, to be inside and with her

when the nurse drew the gray curtains,

when the flowers on the sill were trapped between window and cloth,

pressed up against the glass like some

embalmed specimen. I wanted to feel the same

crease of cool air that she felt turning over

onto her stomach, the thin gown sliding open in back

slicing her in half. The spine. The cleaving calves.

We are two halves.

And I wanted to see the nurse placing

white gauze in a stack, watch the morphine drip.

To find some sort of rhythm in all of it,

some sort of pattern

the way her skin would later be, the doctor told us,

like a pincushion belonging to a meticulous

seamstress who kept her needles in straight rows

down and across in the cushion's flesh.

And all of this to be torn apart.

Yes, I wanted to at least hear her scream,

to hold her hand, her head even, while the nurse

again ripped the bandage off

in order to keep the wound fresh,

keep it fertile for grafting.

But she had asked me to go out into the hallway.

I sat in the chair on the west side of the building

and pretended to find patience in warmth

while she screamed over there, three times a day, screamed

because there was nothing left to do,

no morphine strong enough.

And she had asked me to go out into the hall.

And she screamed because it was wrong

and she wouldn't say that it was wrong

and she wouldn't let me see so that I might say

that it was wrong.

I sat there with only my careless imagination.

A mirror unable to reflect from such a distance

without distorting, a lung inhaling smoke

that it may be closer to numbness and pain.

MIRA ROSENTHAL'S poems have recently appeared in Ploughshares, Seneca Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere.