At the Doctor's Office

I'm dusting off one that some of you have seen before.

It came to me on a routine visit to the doctor's office ... I was, indeed, perched on the end of an examining table ... waiting ... and watching the rain.

Then I reached for the folded scrap of paper I always carry in my hip pocket, and started writing.

"At the Doctor's Office" was originally published in Potpourri, was subsequently nominated for Pushcart Prize honors, and is now part of a manuscript in search of a publisher:

AT THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE

Random needles of rain

start darting diagonally

like the silent scratchings

of cat claws on the window

where the traffic is zooming

and sizzling past, hauling

away the remains of Thursday,

blurring beyond the sycamore,

its mottled gray-green trunk

whispering of a deep-forest

stream while seeming utterly

misplaced here where concrete

suffers the presence of so few

trees, where my strongest

efforts at contiguous thought

produce only fragments too tiny

to mend, unleavened images,

lacking all savor of meaning,

where I perch, dry-mouthed

and nervous, my legs dangling

from the end of this table,

and wait, as I always do,

for a door to open softly,

carefully, into this silence,

this sterile, stifling silence.

© 2001

***

Today's word: needles

Afterthoughts ... in response to your comments:

Thank you, Magran. I'm glad you felt that the poem put you there, sitting on the examining table, watching the raindrops slanting across the glass of the window. When that happens, I feel I've really done it right.