By the time I get used to a new country
And figure the threading of its corridors
I have to move on, learning no routes perfectly
Except safely at home with my familiar
Companions, appliances, procedures, and paths.
Lately I have found that hospitals are alien lands:
Their arrival lounges cloned from each other,
Where the sun, if you see it, is on the wrong path,
With futile attempts to speak the local tongue,
And anesthetics which fog me like jet lag.
The beds are not really beds but levitate weirdly.
The tv has only channels never watched at home
Endlessly repeating mind-poisoning commercials.
On the second day I found a good radio channel
With classical music, but with an endless crawl
Repeating the number of a repairman; my eyes revolted.
Then, on the third day, the day they expelled me to rehab,
I discovered I could get my music with no crawling ad
On a channel called Skycam: a fixed view facing South
From the hospital’s roof, showing a high-rise ascending
With Navy Pier in the background, a tall yellow crane
Dangling a beam and below that swinging beam
What looked like an orange 1958 Chrysler sedan
Or at least the top half of one, with four men
Pointing and gesturing, to what end I could not know.
I recalled the old comic strip Bringing Up Father
Where Jiggs and his cohorts would balance precariously
On unsteady beams with rivet buckets, until Jiggs gave up
And went to the opera with Maggie or luckily escaped
To Dinty Moore’s for suds, for me a perfect half hour
And a bit with a live Shostakovich string quintet composed
To please his patron, mad Stalin, for in 1940 Stalin
Was not all mad, and it was better to toady to him
Than to the even madder Wagnerian Hitler. Shostakovich
Maybe lied in public about this or maybe lied in private;
Those whose patrons are dictators never know exactly
When they are lying. If they survive their monstrous patrons
And some of the stuff written to please them is good,
That is enough, and this quintet and old funny paper memories
And the slow decoding of the Skycam image with surreal tailfins
With thoughts of the freedom creators sometimes find
While working for the masterful arrogant who cause pain
Only to protect posterity from greater pain later on.
