Pariahs

Lightly lay your left hand
on the left shoulder.
Leave it there,
the whole time you listen.

Move the stethoscope right to left,
slowly, creeping up,
like a dog in a bed.
They know the ritual.
Right. Left.
Breathe. Breathe.
The touch is what is important.
Like lepers with warning bells,
they have faced masks,
refusals, corridors of stares.

Today is 50 below: windchill.
Apologize when you lay them
smoothly on their backs
on the paper covered table,
then rest your hand
on the left side
of their bare bellies,
hoping not to find their spleens.

The steam from the heating vents
of the skeleton Veteran’s Hospital
being built across the way
clouds the hurrying workers
in the pre-dawn. In this season,
all skin must be covered
as it will freeze flat in one minute.
From layers of ski masks and scarves,
all are indecipherable.

Riding on the freeway,
trying to determine
if your headlights are really on,
sometimes you seem to be flying blind.

Midwifery

Here are the signs, I say.

Early, a slow withdrawal,
and long retreats into sleep.
Sometimes, visions:
chatting with ancestors;
babies appearing in room’s corners.

And the ebbing of appetite:
less and less frequent succumbing
to specially fixed treats.

Everything slows. Everything.
The body is shutting down.

Even the breaths, timid
as transparent fledglings, dropped
from their nests in a storm.

The pauses stretch,
like darkness advancing
sooner and sooner
each night in autumn.

During the bedtime vigils,
you can time
the spaces . . . ten, twenty seconds,
finally, a whole, astounding minute.

No gasping or bleeding, as commonly conjured.

You might not even realize at first
that the last breath was the last breath,
until there is no next one.

Both poems originally published in slightly different versions in the poet’s chapbook,
The Undifferentiated