The Poetry of Medicine
by S. Scott Paist, MD
Her body is in ruin.
A city nearly uninhabitable.
Newark comes to mind.
But, to be fair,
Perhaps ancient Athens or Constantinople.
She stares out of dark blue eyes
Looks out from under somehow
Her expression clenched like her hands
Her knees polished spheres on wires
Backbone a sickle.
Her abdomen another smooth roundness
Breasts folds of flesh over boney ripples.
She tries to speak but her mouth is full of eggs served an hour ago.
A touch on her shoulder produces only wider eyes
An upper denture falls across a capital O.
A stuffed bear sits on her table
Surveying all of this.
Its eyes are bright, its smile stitched.
Its paws velcro a card.
“Dear Mom,” it reads, “Get well soon.”
Dementia
It’s seen as a curse
A loss of self itself
A Catastrophe
Emptiness.
It also tiptoes on a slight slope
Downward to be sure, but easy.
Gentle fog settling slowly sliding
Into forgetting.
Seeing the same birds at the feeder as an hour earlier
Brings joy of a new discovery
While death
Slowly wraps its arms around from behind.
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