Short Staffed

Is the doctor an intellectual?
Perhaps he gains or regains that role
as he breaks and flees. Certainly
the narrating yet critical voice
that draws its energy from conscience but isn’t
conscience marks the thinker. As does
the panic (reaffirming self)
he displays as the stinking
patients in the stinking
corridor, from gurneys, pallets, feces, ask
news of themselves or loved ones, clutch
his stethoscope, his no-longer-white
coat. That voice, those voices weren’t
here a moment ago, there was only
doing what one can;
now only flight. He gains the outside,
which in this two-thirds-world isn’t
too different from the inside: crowds,
collapse. I could no longer face
the sores. The voice (Would it be better
if they were war wounds, shrapnel?
Plenty of those elsewhere,
might be easier) commiserates.
He sits, the stethoscope sprawls on
dry grass. Is the intellectual a doctor?
The stethoscope seems
to be listening to the sky, which will
maintain its halting beat until it doesn’t.

Frederick Pollack
Washington, DC
[email protected]
www.frederickpollack.com
 
Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS (Story Line Press; the former reissued 2022 by Red Hen Press), and three collections, A POVERTY OF WORDS (Prolific Press, 2015), LANDSCAPE WITH MUTANT (Smokestack Books, UK, 2018), and THE BEAUTIFUL LOSSES (Better Than Starbucks Books, 2023). Many other poems in print and online journals.

Image by Mulyadi