Saturday
Aug. 3, 2013
Waiting for My Clothes
The day the doctors and nurses are having
their weekly patient interviews, I sit waiting
my turn outside the office, my back to the wall,
legs curled up under my chin, playing
with the hem of my white hospital gown.
They have taken everything they thought
should be taken — my clothes, my books
my music, as if being stripped of these
were part of the cure, like removing the sheath
from a blade that has slaughtered.
They said, Wait a few days, and if you're good
you can have your things back. They'd taken
my journal, my word made flesh, and I think
of those doctors knowing me naked
holding me by my spine, two fingers
under my neck, the way you would hold a baby,
taking my soul from between my ribs
and leafing through the pages of my thoughts,
as if they were reading my palms,
and my name beneath them like a confession,
owning this girl, claiming this world
of blackness and lightness and death
and birth. It lies in their hands like a life-line,
and I feel myself fall open or apart.
They hear my voice as they read
and think, Who is this girl that is speaking?
I know the end, she tells them.
It is the last line, both source and closing.
It is what oceans sing to, how the sun moves,
a place for the map-maker to begin.
Behind the door, nothing is said.
Like dreams, my clothes come out of their boxes.
It's the birthday of mystery author P(hyllis) D(orothy) James (books by this author), born in Oxford, England (1920). She is known for her detective novels and said, "The classical detective story affirms our belief that we live in a rational and generally benevolent universe."
She gets ideas for her novels from places she visits — communities or beaches or old houses — and begins with the setting. Her main character is Detective Inspector Adam Dalgliesh.
James says, "One reason why women are good at writing detective stories may be our feminine eye for detail; clue-making demands attention to the detail of everyday life."
It's the birthday of one of America's first embedded reporters, Ernie Pyle (books by this author), born Ernest Taylor Pyle in a little white farmhouse near Dana, Indiana (1900).
In the fall of 1940, Pyle went to London to travel around with Yank troops, and they went to Africa, Italy, and France. He wrote for newspapers about World War II in the form of daily letters home from the war front. When he covered the war, he never made it look glamorous. He hated it, and described all the horror and agony around him. He included the names and hometown addresses of all the soldiers he wrote about.
His letters entered about 14,000,000 homes. He wrote, "For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit."
On April 18, 1945, he and a colonel were in a jeep riding to the command post on an Island just west of Okinawa when they were shot at by Japanese machine guns. They dove into a ditch, where a second shot hit Pyle in the left temple, killing him instantly.
People all over the country mourned Pyle's death. President Truman said, "No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told."
It's the birthday of the poet Diane Wakoski (books by this author), born in Whittier, California, in 1937. She has written more than 40 books of poetry, including The Motorcycle Betrayal Poems (1971), which she dedicates to "all those men who betrayed me at one time or another."
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®
