Among the Nurses

There is a cloud of nurses
buoyant with amusement
and knowledge.
You are carried in arms,
along halls, pausing to hear
a nurse's story; moving on quickly.

The nurses are arms,
patting, caressing, running
one finger along the bounce of a vessel.
The nurses are ears, and sighs:
they always know these stories.

Listen, they say,
it sounds like hairs
rubbed between two fingers:
it is the lungs.

Behind thin walls of white curtains,
I listen, as trained.
There is a bubble of laughter
as the nurses tell more stories.
There are smiles among feces and bones.
The nurses are hugging themselves
and each other.

Among bells and calls,
they are interchangeable.
The nurses nod knowingly.
Their arms reach, and stretch.

Artist’s Statement

I n my youth, I learned to love poetry. My father would read aloud from Leaves of Grass or from a paperback anthology increasingly frayed, eventually coverless and lost to time. Annabel Lee became so familiar I can still recite it today. I attempted some writing of my own. A few publications in school and local journals resulted. In college, as an Anthropology major, I became the winner of the English Department's yearly Vandewater Poetry Award. Then real life intervened. I signed up for nursing school after realizing I needed a reliable job. I became a mother. I seemingly forgot about poetry.

One day, after a long shift working alongside familiar nurses in the chemotherapy clinic, the muse visited me. Among the Nurses resulted. The title, I recently realized, is lifted from ethnographic formula. I was surprised and delighted by its ability to connect my past and present. Dissimilar entities juxtaposed resulted in what Jerome Rothenberg and others have enticingly discussed as the alchemy of metaphor. I fell in love with this transformational process. I made an effort to regularly write in a journal I had haphazardly started twenty years prior. I sought out poetry and poetics. I tried to read poetry every day. I made a goal to write at least one poem per month, secretly awaiting a revisitation by the usually elusive muse. I learned to respect the subconscious. I learned to revise and revise. I occasionally enrolled in a community workshop. Sometimes I participated in readings. Eventually, publications followed. The wonders of the Internet facilitated some of this. Also, my son was becoming launched.

All the while, I continued to work full time as a nurse in various settings and locations. My role as a visiting nurse for hospice has now occupied nearly half of my nearly thirty years as a practicing nurse. I am still daily “Among the Nurses.” But although illness and related topics are rarely overt in my poems, an awareness of the fleeting nature of life continues to inform my poetry.