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1
1

You've seen it on a waiting-room wall,
soothing, meant to quell impatience,
distract a troubled mind.
Beyond a balustraded terrace
bougainvillea, morning glories,
and red anemones shade
a cobbled street descending
past scattered tile-roofed houses
to sloops and ketches
anchored in a blue lagoon.
Palermo, Mallorca, Martinique, Caracas,
who knows?

2

 It hangs, too, in the room
where she waits to die.
Its solace cycles with the morphine.
Stark and desperate, her cold mind's eye
gives color to the numbing drip,
imagines an azure swirl in the clear saline,
an eddy in the opaque bag,
draining through the looping tube
into her screaming veins and brain.

3

 She wanders through the morphine fog
across the balcony and down the hill.
Antiseptic stench of hospice diligence
fades to flower scent in warm salt air.
Choppy wavelets chuckle,
slap against the tethered boats.
She moves beyond the shore
above the foam-tipped breakers,
watches stars and sun and crescent moon
whirl around a sapphire sky.


4
4

The drug-trance ebbs.
She grits her teeth and counts the minutes.
Flat and dull against the wall,
the picture waits.

Posted by Vivian on June 12, 2008
Tags: Uncategorized

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Total comments on this page: 8

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Rob on paragraph 4:

Vivian, I think this whole poem is amazing! Until the last line. I like what you are trying to do with it, but there is something about the last sentence that loses the music, and while that could be a good thing, I’m not sure it is here. I’m not crazy about the word choice of “buy” and I really don’t like the use of “morphine” here either. Use a metaphor instead, perhaps something that recalls the drip image.

I also wonder about the use of Wal-Mart in the title, but I have no real explanations or suggestions.

All that griping aside, however, I absolutely love what you’ve done in this poem. The idea behind it is brilliant. The imagery is amazing and so vivid and poetic. Great stuff! My complaint about the end is simply that it doesn’t seem as strong as the rest of the poem, and that with a little more work, you could make it even stronger. Of course, I could be completely wrong…

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June 12, 2008 3:26 pm
Meagan M. on paragraph 1:

Your description reminds me of those Thomas Kincade paintings they sell everywhere (though I guess those really aren’t cheap enough for a waiting room). You describe them so beautifully; I love details like “bougainvillea, morning glories” and “sloops and ketches.” Rob is right, there’s a real music to this poem, especially the first two stanzas.

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June 12, 2008 7:15 pm
Meagan M. on paragraph 4:

I think I agree with Rob about the ending. The last two lines don’t hold up with the music and imagery of the rest of the poem. I half expected a rhyme at the end, as I was reading through, but that was just me and might not work. I like the idea of using more metaphor for the morphine, and maybe some other way to express its ability to “transport” her. Or you could let the two lines before it stand on their own. They make a pretty strong statement.

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June 12, 2008 7:21 pm
Rob :

I think I could support Meagan’s idea of just cutting the last two lines, but if you do that, you might change what would then be the last line to more of a clause, where the picture becomes the subject of a verb. Give it some agency in the room.

However, I would first try to see if you can hit a homerun by echoing the “waits” without starting a new sentence (probably by deleting the “she”) and then repeat one of the wonderful images from the first 2 or 3 stanzas, but also inject a heavenly feel to it, so that it’s ambiguous whether she is wanting the escape of morphine or death. An extreme and borderline cheesy example might be: “waits again for morning glories beyond the sapphire sky.” But you can do much better than that.

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June 13, 2008 9:05 am
SBW on whole page :

Vivian, I got an e-mail this morning from Nathan Blaesing, the new owner of Dr. Java. He’s a wonderful addition to the art community in Mobile. This is his e-mail:

I have checked out the Blog and I love it, but my time has been too limited to really partake aside from reading the comments and lastest poem by Vivian that reminds me how much Wal-Mart makes me feel like I’m sucking my last breath into a numb state of medicated hospice bed whenever I’ve had the displeasure of a trip through its doors. Though, I recognize it more on the gray faces of the occupants that seem only slightly living and gray rather than the art on its bathroom walls.

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June 13, 2008 8:58 am
SBW on paragraph 4:

Vivian, I agree with Meagan and Rob. The poem is so strong that the last stanza doesn’t do justice to what is written before. I think Meagan hit upon something here: I think the first two lines of the last stanza say all that needs to be said.

SBW

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June 13, 2008 9:00 am
Vivian on whole page :

Thanks, everyone, for your feedback on this poem. No poem is ever really finished …

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June 13, 2008 4:11 pm
Rini on whole page :

I do love the descriptions. I also really like the allegorical connection between going to Wal-Mart and going to a nursing home.

The nursing home morphine is a good stand-in for the Wal-Mark Muzak (always interrupted by ‘whatever’ is needed in aisle 5). This reminds me of visiting my grandfather (age 97 and only halfway sentient) in the nursing home where he died, and I get the feeling that you have a similar issue, past or present going on here. I’m just glad that my grndfather didn’t need morphine at the end.

This is really nice. I’m impressed.

Rini

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June 14, 2008 10:26 pm
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