S.A.
Little Rock, USA
What poem would you want your doctor to read?
GN
Dear S.A.
I’ve been in a great deal of doctor’s offices since 2019. Once I went to get an ultrasound of my heart and while the doctor smeared jelly on my chest, he asked what I did. Told him I was a writer, what do you write, poetry, oh poetry? The doctor nodded assiduously in the glow of the echo machine. I could see my heart on the monitor, it was a little flapping fish, its mouth aflutter, I thought it was amazing to see it so unmetaphorically on this expensive machine I’d harassed my insurance to cover.
What kind of poetry do you write? he asked. I typically deflected towards my translation work, which people didn’t realize was a deflection, since it answered the question of what someone’s poetry was like, if not mine. I tried to think of something I was reading lately but with a name big enough he might recognize. Maybe that’s not what people want but I’m sensitive to their desire for recognition. Frank O’Hara? Never understood him, he said, then toweled the slime off my sternum. I love Virgil, I like Plath. Everything looks fine, he said, until it isn’t. Often a prolapse will remain the same size all your life, no more than a shortness of breath here and there. But it might expand. Come back in three years for another scan. Good luck with the poetry!
Anyways I’m thinking what poetry I would want a doctor to read me. Partly because the body can be so unembodied in that state of tests and measurements and diagnostics. One more anecdote: I’d had a scare as a teen when they listened to my heart during a physical. Went to a cardiologist who confirmed that the reading was bizarre, but it was because I knew I was being monitored and that second order awareness had jolted my heart to behave slightly strangely under observation! So I wonder what poetry could put me in the right state to be present with my concerns and sensations but also take into account the split effect of being in your body while it’s being observed from a different vantage (and you, in your anxiety, or your hopeful anticipation, try to meet that different vantage in advance).
I thought of the Korean modernist poet Yi Sang, who often pretended he was a doctor in his poems. I’ll share one below, translated by Jack Jung.
Maybe I’d prefer to read it in the waiting room? Maybe the doctor would have read it too. But I wince a bit at the know-it-all nature of the quick visit, if it smacks of a test I’d rather poetry be left out of it. You know where I’d want it is in the doctor’s office, in that lull between getting your vitals and waiting for the doctor to appear. That sounds right. And I would want a poem that neither dispels the wait nor promises the end of treatment. Maybe something which takes the anxiety and plays with it a bit, so I could meet myself in what I’m feeling.
Yours,
Grace
