Scented with African Bird Peppers <br />and leaning in to a third afternoon, first month <br />of a recluse year, my neighbor looks on wistful <br />as an overweight high school girl. <br /> <br />She's been dumped, assigned <br />to our flambeau colored sanitarium. <br />The faux brick pillars of the day room, <br />beds that open and close like clam shells, <br />perpendicular corridors content with themselves <br />like the interlaced fingers of a priest. <br /> <br />Tropaeolum vines garland her shoulders <br />and ginger cheeks, the blue veined copper feet, <br />beige skin tinted by an ancient Kenyan sultanate. <br />Contralto in the African Methodist Episcopal church, <br />she corrects her rare words with the nurse <br />and moves her lips reading the hospital pamphlet. <br /> <br />The little finger pokes out when she holds <br />a tinctured fruit drink, studying the glass <br />as though assaying gold, the tonsured head bobs <br />as a telegraph operator might snap a metal key, <br />a shimmy off her aluminum crowned pate. <br /> <br />And as the overhead fan turns on we lift our soup <br />without a sound, dwindling light and speechless night, <br />a radio at bedtime like an eddy of silver moon.<br /><br />Bernard Henrie<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/readable-hospital-information-leaflets-for-elderly-patients/
