Sally Read
Knowledge
The other nurse whispers
as we billow sheets, yank them
on the empty bed, smooth. She’s telling
about a pile of dead bodies. We fold
corners in automatic moves.
Not twisted back feet, out-flung arms,
eyes trapped in shock. Or neat rows of heads
bent on strange shoulders as though
in sleep. Just that she searched
for her father,
as we go, brim-armed to the laundry.
How she found him in one pile of corpses.
I don’t ask for details, but they gleam,
unspoken, like spilt urine.
We march to the next bed, arrange
creased sheets round the fragile,
brown-spotted arms of a woman.
The nurse’s eyes are vague, almost
lit, as if their filmy doors
are kicked in.
At the next bed we wrest off
the blankets; I think of soldiers sent
to the Tropics, how dormant sweat
glands bleed open and never close;
back in the cool
of their country they stream broken
channels of sweat. We work deftly,
the sheets hardly exist in our hands,
and she never says more -
as we grasp another man under
his arms, pull his rigid weight,
bang pillows with a free hand -
it’s as if she can’t see me,
her sight is shot
with that much light.
Page(s) 55
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