Ed note: We posted last week about Bob Bowen, who was killed
recently in a hit-and-run accident, leaving behind his two children
Bobby and Stella, our friend the poet Amy Lemmon and countless others
who knew and loved him. You can read more here about a PayPal account that has been establish to provide for Bobby and Stella's care. Here is a lovely poem by Amy Lemmon:
In-patients
Love, how could you sleep that night
when we two lay on the separate
adjustable beds, flattened, stunned,
as if we were the ones who had been diagnosed?
you drifted from me.
My mind spangled awake
at 2 a.m. to its deepest-ever blank
a holy gap too vast
to fall into.
I trundled past night-nurses at station,
shuffled to the elevator, through push-button
security doors, donned the yellow gown, worked
the footpedal sink, handled the betadyne scrub.
The ghoulish daylight gleam of the place, even at three a.m.
Nurses puppeteered me through the I.V.
and monitor wires, moved the rocker
so I could hold my flawed and scary baby,
diapered by someone else’s hands.
Meanwhile, love, you slept—was it fitful,
or true black solid gone-ness?—your face softened
like well-worked dough. I could not know
I was only beginning to be alone with it.
-- by Amy Lemmon
