I want to read perhaps two more poems, one
that I was kind of happy and disturbed by after it
was published.
I got a letter from a doctor--
this is a poem about a quack in my hometown.
And his primary accomplishment was to get, I would say,
33% of the people in the county addicted to barbiturates,
for which he may have a good place in glory or not.
But he was characterized by people
as a heart specialist, a nerve specialist, and that rarest
of Southern characters--
a female doctor.
And I just thought that he always told people something,
and he gave them a word, and it made them happy.
And so this woman in the Northwest
wrote me a letter, a doctor, and said
she wanted to publish it in a medical article
that she was publishing.
So I thought, oh no.
That's what doctors do.
They give us a name we don't understand, and we go, yeah--
[INAUDIBLE]
And you go, [INAUDIBLE].
It turns into your little death mantra.
"Mortal Sorrows."
"The tortures of lumbago consumed Aunt Madge,
and Leah Vest once resigned from schoolmarming,
could not be convinced to leave the house.
Mrs. Mary Hogan, after birthing her fifth son,
lay bedfast for the last 52 years of her life.
Reporting shooting pains that would begin high in her back
and shear downward to her feet, as though, she said,
she had been glazed in lightning.
Also men broken on bridges and mills, shell-shocked veterans,
religious alcoholics, Leldon Kilpatrick, Johnson Suggs,
Whitey Carlyle.
They came and sat there too, leafing
through yellowing Pageants and Progressive Farmers.
One by one, all entered in and talked
while the good doctor gargled a dark chaff in his pipe
and took down symptoms, annotating them
on his hidden chart.
Numbness, neuralgia, the knotted lymph, the clammy palms.
And then he'd scratch his temples,
meaningful patch of white, and scrawl out his unfailing
barbiturate prescription to be filled by his pharmacist
brother-in-law until half the county had gathered
as in a lap--
the quantum ache, the mutiny in every house.
How much pain?
How many diseases consigned to the mythological?
The dropped ovaries, the torn up nerves, what women said,
what men wanted to believe.
Part of it laughable, I know.
Still, I want someone to see, now that they lie safe in graves
beyond the vacant stores, that someone listened
and, hearing the wrong at the heart, named it something
that sounded real.
Whatever they lived through and died of.
I remember Mrs. Lyle, who called it a thorn in the flesh, and Mr.
Appleton who had no roof in his mouth."