Devil’s Lake

We think we’ve seen the last of snow. New sheen

hangs from the female doctors’ hems; they seem to have

torn off insect wings, crocus hearts, stitched

them into dresses. The men’s shoes squeak

and sigh, lighter, sleeker by the shift. All is fresh

and loud, talk melting from the nurse’s bay

and running silver fingers to the rooms

of stunned, unthawed sick. Early March, only time

when everything’s in evidence: smashed vellumy hostas,

skin of mud on parking lots, and in here scores of eyes

and knees, round and pale as bird-full eggs.

A miniature woman, I think, or badly stretched and sharpened

little girl sits in her bed. The chart says she is thirty-five

and names the white tissue rooted like spring onion

in the shallow bank between her skull and nape—

“astrocytoma,” like you could peer under her ponytail

and see the sky. Her little crop sends shoots around

those terrains of mind that give off hunger and thirst,

so she wants “nothing”—so little fat around her mouth

making the word. Her father, back from the cafeteria

pink and heaving, plants a chocolate Good Humor

bar in her hands, wonders how long I’ve been here poking.

Nine questions more till I can disappear.

By number three she gives me—what?—a glare, her pity—

surgery has slackened the muscles of her illegible eyes.

Her fingers rustle the red wrapper to soft pulp.

The father, I know, wills it to her mouth. Questions five, six.

I know how a Good Humor melts—the little outer flecks

loosen and slide as the cream skin under them changes

expression, a slow smile or sigh. Pretend it’s a game

I tell myself, more savage days. If I offend,

it will be forgotten by summer, when new bodies take

up old beds and, on stifling hospital grounds,

plots of bulbs are all turned under.