POEMS FROM THE EMERGENCY ROOM

Everyone’s sleeping. The Arab girl in the bed next to you,
her mother, the one whose name sounds
like joy, the medical secretary
who's named the way we would have named
your sister,
if you had a sister.

And I sit at your bedside, lurking
in the dark in ambush for pain as I would
for a rapist.

Your body thins away. Only your face widens at night,
Your orbits gaping like two dry throats.
Fear is dry too, permeating the bones mutely.

I take care to dress you with clothes smelling of home.
That's how I mark you as not from here.
You are so distracted, always starting from the middle,
offended by being misunderstood, by needing
words, like the rest of us.

You measure pain the way we measure height.
My dreams endure the time passing
between sighs.

Night translates love into simple acts: straightening the pillow,
rinsing the chamber pot, covering you up. Treating smells
with detachment,
counting deeds instead of moments. Son, I say to you, son.
And I remember how someone asked, on the morning of your circumcision,
whether you were my first born,
and I swelled with tears, still, silent, like a lake.

POEMS FROM THE EMERGENCY ROOM