Nurse's Notes
When Rose came in to hospital to die
the nurses were angry,
not that they weren't used to patients who died,
but they liked to have more hope than Rose was
giving
them.
Also, they had known her years before,
when, even sick, she was robust and warm.
Rose was not a woman anymore,
a homunculus of sixty four pounds,
cachectic, comatose, irradiated,
and therefore bald.
Therapy had not cured, but had allowed her
to live, with flesh consumed
by cancer.
Dottie, who was charge of the floor,
assigned her to me because I was new
and had not known her before.
I screwed up my courage, as the poet said.
If Rose must die I would find meaning,
symbols, something new.
I would be stronger than the other nurses
so Rose and I would reach transcendence.
Silently, the scented talc, falling on her skin,
made her cry out in coma sleep.
A corner of the washcloth, used to wipe
the slightest of secretions from the corners
of her mouth, scraped her skin like steel wool.
She had no teeth. She cried asleep.
I gave the morphine one half hour
before it was time to turn.
(You turn patients in bed, or skin
breaks down,
joints contract,
grow stiff.)
A maximum dose was never enough.
We could not snow her;
I could not die for her.
Mind was in over its head.
Watching Rose, I saw
a figure like the Christ,
with knees drawn up to chin.
The passive exercise–bending, extending,
stretching–caused her so much pain
I could not bear it.
She was becoming a circle on a bed neither male
nor
female.
No crowds, no public crucifixion, but alone
with nurses only for witness.
As bare a skull as ever lay on Golgotha,
purified as if by fire,
and then came water:
diaphoresis. It was the morphine
made her flood with sweat.
I had to dry her then,
the lightest touch of towel a hair shirt.
When Rose died I was not there,
so I did not get to give her p. m. care:
I did not witness, wash, comb, straighten, fold,
pad, shroud,
or call the orderly
for assistance with the transfer of the body.
When I came back
there were other patients to tend.
