At the Doctor's Office

Today I'm dusting off one that some of you may 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