The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Four Poems

Passage
Hands at Forty
For Rachel, 1982 - 2007
My cadaver's uterus

James S. Wilk, M.D.
JKandJWilk@aol.com

***

Passage

Birthing turns a woman into a train. Breath
hisses through her teeth like a locomotive
churning steam. Arms struggle like mighty pistons
pushing the bed rails.

Groans and rumbles signal her anxious kin—some
drinking coffee, others up pacing—that their
long-awaited passenger exits shrieking,
rumpled from travel.

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***

Hands at Forty

Men often rediscover at forty,
deep in mirrors while shaving,
their fathers’ faces.

But I see in the warm amnion
of sinks, soap and running water
my father’s hands.

God gave him the deft, uncalloused
hands of a pianist, but not the ear;
long, sinewy fingers,

the hills and valleys of his knuckles
abraded and bleeding,
desiccated by endless days

of latex gloves donned
for deliveries, pap smears and hysterectomies
and by all that soap and scrubbing.

How reptilian they looked!
with their polygonal scales
and linear cracks,

like twin lizards crawling
on my mother’s shoulders
when he used to caress the nape of her neck,

fingers slithering through her hair.
But every month and a half,
he would carefully file his nails

into unscratching, semi-lunar curves
to begin a process of nightly ablutions,
slathering on lotions and emollients,

sleeping with sweat socks over his hands
for a week or so, until by Saturday
they were smooth and ready.

And then he would drive out
of state to spend the weekend
with his mistress.

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***

For Rachel, 1982 - 2007

I wasn't there to witness your death --
but I dropped my stethoscope when I heard --
but only the aftermath: your delicate, naked
frame hospital-gowned in blue, the plastic
breathing tube taped to your ashen lips,
that worm-like IV burrowed in your groin,
the blood within it burgundy and motionless
as the spoonful of urine in the catheter.

Your concave chest matched
your sunken eyes and scaphoid abdomen
until you were hollow, an empty canoe,
floating somewhere downstream,
beyond all memory of food,
west into the September dusk.

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***

My cadaver's uterus

Surely Eve's womb was larger
than this flattened pink plum.

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About the Author

James S. Wilk is a physician in Denver, Colorado, specializing in internal medicine and medical disorders complicating pregnancy. His poetry has recently appeared or will appear in The Pharos, The Blue Unicorn, Contemporary Sonnet, The Lyric, Measure, and The Panhandler Quarterly.

Published: November 2, 2007