Triage

Along my hospitable hall
I hear tongues speaking in people —
a kind and suffering, jumbled
and scared, multilingual choral
improvisation. From my bed,
I hear the patients and healers
conversing in disheveled rooms,
up crowded corridors of more
beds, following diagonals
of waiting, resignation, not
knowing, perhaps recovery.
In the whole inmost ward of my
self, the beds are occupied by
slow-moving remembrances like
time-lapse flower novels. At night,
now, outside the closed windows with-
in me, and outside the clinic,
I see tiny stars glittering
at the bare twig-tips of dark, cold,
sleeping, winter lindens, maples —
each twinkling branch-end a midnight
candelabrum of the cosmos.