Hospital Time
John Tessitore
We weren’t waiting for sunrise. In this place
there is no difference between morning and night.
A long stay here is a single moment.
Although the room brightens my boy is tenebrous,
reticent, withholds the answers to questions
I haven’t asked him yet, as if he knows his eyes
retain the dusk, dim like the sky when darkness
crowds the light, like the shimmer on the harbor
before the storm clouds drag their lines of rain.
The hour, the weather, give us this picture:
a forgotten Whistler framed in our window
on the eighteenth floor, a nocturne sun hanging
over restless waters, the slow resolution
of the city below, lattice streets climbing
the Fells to the highway and a free run
to my former lover’s horizon—to our secret
trail through the pine, the ledge where we kissed
for the first time. The moon. The distant skyline.
*
The light on the river must last longer today
than yesterday, or else the gilded luster tarnishes
at a slower rate, as if the hours have agreed
to linger, wait for themselves. From this height I cannot
paint for him a happy scene, as more clouds roll in,
but there is less gloom and fewer ways to sense
the crisis, the burden that weighs us down. As long
as we are flesh and bone, lighter is easier.
Yesterday a line of white sails tacked back and forth
across the Charles. I have never felt anything
glide as smoothly along a surface. New England
is like this. The wealthy here keep their traditions,
each a small victory over friction. And all
the white spires bristle like semaphore around
the mosques and synagogues, and all the suspicious
Catholics. And on the far hill in Somerville, the church
where we were married, his mother and I, on a day
so clear we may have seen this window in the glare.
*
This city has never been my place but once,
and that was with someone else. In the waiting
stillness, old darkness, memory like the fireworks
that sear this very patch of sky every Fourth
of July, when the night shudders, swerves, pivots
around a fulcrum of light—a star tonight, the moon,
the nine-fifteen from Logan to Laguardia.
Anywhere but here. He looks like an apostle,
a thin Caravaggio, hollow in the hands
of the gentle women, some so lovely I envy
their attention yet he remains a beggar,
an outcast among the lepers, a symbol
of endurance, of spirit, of suffering, faded
but redeeming us by his sacrifice. This portrait
of a martyr, my son who only wants to sleep.
Through the window, a whisp of cloud like a tatter
scudding smooth in a steady breeze I cannot feel
but know from its effect: a slow shift in perspective.
JOHN TESSITORE has been a teacher, journalist and biographer, and directed national policy studies on education and civil justice. He is Co-Editor Across the Pond for The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press. His poems have appeared in a variety of books and journals. He has published several volumes of poetry, a novella, and hosts a poetry podcast, Be True.
