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I can remember that musty fourth floor, with the brand new TB wing, Roosevelt Hospital, 1991. I know it was cold. At the nurse's station, we watched The Persian Gulf War on a small, old, black-and-white TV. Commercials came on, dispelling old myths on new viruses, while we still double gloved, as if that could really protect you from AIDS or hepatitis B. But we still stood ready, our wisdom minds razor-keen, more deliberate and deadlier than the bombs and battalions we saw on the tube. I felt like David, slaying the Goliaths of suffering and pain, not knowing if I was concerned for my patients or me. Perhaps it didn't matter; I could change the world.
It happened one February night, just before I got married. Oh, it just happened; I wasn't looking. The thirty gauge, filled with HIV, pierced my skin; went right in like a guided missile armed with a hundred HIV warheads, my starched whites, red-soiled and stained with both our blood-- like we were blood- brothers now, tainted with a new truth, a hard love, an idea of fellowship my alcoholic father couldn't possibly understand. I wouldn't tell him; just made the trip to Employee Health, cried, then popped the AZT five times daily like they told me.
Like waking from a concussion, I realized I took in all of him-- every bit. No, not his sexual orientation, the I.V. heroin and the smoked crack; no, not his Pneumocystis carini, opportunistic and weary like a thirty years war. No, with one drop, I took in more: his fear, his dying, the suffering of love, our own phantoms absorbed and remembered from sources older than Man, ubiquitous, but right here-- hard, concrete, coiled in the gut (maybe that's the AZT), perhaps sprung from the Garden and meant to be shared. And though I've been HIV-negative for ten years, I share them still. You see, he may be gone, but I've learned that each wears his death like a loose-fitting garment-- some as a sheet, some as a shroud, some as a cape, maybe some as a gown. Me, well, sitting here and writing to you, I've learned to wear them all with a smile and a frown.
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