Veteran’s Hospital

Veteran’s Hospital

by Ben Belitt

Bringing “only what is needed—essential

toilet articles” in a paper bag,

dressed as for dying, one sees the dying plainly.

These are the homecomings of Agamemnon,

the odysseys to the underside of the web

that weaves and unweaves while the suitors gorge upon plenty

and the languishing sons at home unwish their warring

fathers with strong electric fingers.

                                                                      The fathers are failing.

In the Hospital Exchange, one sees the dying plainly:

color televisions, beach towels, automatic razors—

the hardware of the affluent society marked

down to cost, to match the negative afflatus

of the ailing, the bandages and badges of their status.

Under the sandbags, rubber hoses, pipettes, bed-clamps,

tax-exempt, amenable as rabbits,

the unenlisted men are bleeding through their noses

in a perimeter of ramps and apparatus.

In that prosthetic world, the Solarium

lights up a junk-pile of used parts: the hip that caught

a ricochet of shrapnel; tattoos in curing meats;

scars like fizzled fuses; canceled postage stamps;

automated claws in candy; the Laser’s edge; and barium.

The nurses pass like mowers, dressing and

undressing in the razor-sharp incisions

and the flowering phosphorescence. The smell

of rubbing alcohol rises on desertions and deprivals

and divorces. It is incorruptible. A wheelchair aims

its hospital pajamas like a gun-emplacement.

The amputee is swinging in his aviary.

His fingers walk the bird-bars.

                                                                         There is singing

from the ward room—a buzzing of transistors

like blueflies in a urinal. War over war,

the expendables of Metz and Chateau-Thierry,

the guerillas of Bien Hoa and Korea,

the draftees, the Reserves, the re-enlisters,

open a common wavelength.

                                                            The catatonic

sons are revving up their combos in the era

of the angry adolescent. Their cry is electronic.

Their thumbs are armed with picks. The acid-rock guitarist

in metal studs and chevrons, bombed with magnesium,

mourns like a country yokel, and the innocents

are slaughtered.

                            On the terrace, there are juices

and bananas. The convalescent listens to his

heartbeat. The chaplain and his non-combative daughter

smile by the clubbed plants on the portico.

                                                                   “They shall overcome.”