Hospital
Desk
Afternoon
Stoplight
The Boat

Hospital

Inside the door, dozens of wheelchairs
abandoned like bumper cars.
Inside, a vaulted ceiling
as if thousands were expected.

Everyone  I see is brown-skinned:
the clerk at the desk who waves me on—
she does not validate on Sundays. 
The cleaners moving silently, 
their carts piled high like peddlers
on endless prairie.

I think about this, sister,
as I scrub my hands
and don the yellow gown and gloves
to enter your room,
you, stuck here all week and
worse to come.

Your nurse is foreign and difficult
to understand, you tell me,
but she sings, Que sera, sera,
whatever will be, will be
You join right in.

Desk

Just now,
the study where the quiet is
and my raw poems,
their edges curling
in July heat, the desk clear
as my brow when I enter
its radiant field.

Then, as if
from stage left, the light dims;
my mind returns
to the classroom
and joins my body so
quietly;

no one hears it
slide into place,
that neat
click.

Afternoon

Quietly,
not disturbing
the silence of the sofa,
the chairs,
the hands of the clock
on the mantel poised one minute
before the hour,

I come into the room flooded
with light.
Beyond the window,
the school yard empty
of children, as our house
is now.

We live here alone.
You are reading
from your pile of books
when I cross over
stepping into angles
of light.

Stoplight

The sudden fragrance of lilac,
the smell of cut grass through
the open window.

My shoulders rest easy,
joints smooth as dancers
in their sockets.

I think of kissing,
the call and response
of flesh and bone.

Then I remember them
missing their first spring,
not in earth
but in air.

The sky above the tree line
dissolves into lavender
at the horizon
where they live now.

I can't take you with me.
The light turns amber.

The Boat

We slip through the darkness, feeling in the boat's rocking
the heaviness of water, under us, around us;

a halo of light in the west, the barest of moons,
the least moon possible.

Docks already gone to darkness, houses barely visible,
but the lives lived there stand in clear panes of light.

We are four friends, two marriages, taking a turn
on the lake. The wind blows up a fierce smell of water and fish.

We are quiet, surrounded by water, rocking
in the darkness of the boat, frail as moths.

"Stoplight", "The Boat", "Desk", and "Afternoon" are reprinted with the author's permission from her book The Watch, published by Whistling Shade Press, 2008, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Norita Dittberner-Jax has been writing poetry for 30 years.  Her collections include WHAT THEY ALWAYS WERE (New Rivers Press), THE WATCH (Whistling Shade Press), and LONGING FOR HOME (Pudding House Press).  She lives in Saint Paul and is currently an MFA student at Hamline University.