The hospitalsmell / combs my nostrils / as they go bobbing along / green and yellow corridors.
What seems a corpse / is trundled into a lift and vanishes / heavenward
I will notfeel, I will not / feel, until / I haveto.
Nurses walk lightly, swiftly, / here and up and down and there,
their slenderwaistsmiraculously / carrying their burden / of somuch pain, so / many deaths, their eyes / still clear after / somanyfarewells.
Ward 7.She lies / in a white cave of forgetfulness.
A withered hand / trembles on its stalk. Eyes move / behind eyelids tooheavy / to raise. Into an arm wasted / of colour a glass fang is fixed, / not guzzling but giving.
And between her and me / distance shrinks till there is none left / but the distance of pain that neither she nor I / can cross.
She smiles a little at this / black figure in her white cave / who clumsily rises
in the round swimmingwaves of a bell / and dizzily goes off, growing fainter, / not smaller, leaving behind only
books that will not be read / and fruitless fruits.