More on: hospital

a dream that repeated: to find the good / you must uproot the pain

You are not here. / Just this precious, flawed body, briefly home / to your soul.

That first morning, I remember
clinging to a table’s edge—
both legs jackhammering the white

linoleum floor tiles—praying for
my benzodiazepine to finally,
finally kick in.

The boy inside me is watching, frowning.
But something else is watching him,

saying, sweetheart, saying, it is so hard.

In the dark, everyone is kind.

It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.                                         —Cid Corman My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life. I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca-cola can. There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.…

I. EVERY FACE IN THE NEONATAL intensive care unit looked apologetic and scared, like old, lonely men do on their deathbeds. A nurse told my wife Georgie how lonely she had been ever since her husband died. An intern cried alone in the far corner of the room and sent her condolences later via email. One…

While my brother and I waited for our father to die, which took longer than we thought it would, one of the hospital’s chaplains came in to visit us. Her name was Cynthia, and the first thing she did was read some passages from The Book of Common Prayer as we stood around our father—…

THE LIGHT OF LATE AFTERNOON touching everything—my hands, my face, the wings of birds—illuminating edges of clouds—the kitchen a bottle of light, pale green filling with sound—the woman playing piano in a room down the hall—everything clean until the boy, the girl, the husband come home—I’m on my knees in the light scrubbing the floor—my…

Why Believe in God? Over the past few years, the Image staff contemplated assembling a symposium based on this simple problem. But we hesitated. Should we pose such a disarmingly straightforward question to artists and writers, who tend to shun the explicit and the rational? Or were we hesitating because the question itself made us…