https://ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com/4764345.html?view=18497465#t18497465
As a tribute to EB's fiction-in-free-verse form, here's a bit of very slightly fictionalized memoir in free-verse form, sharing the memory EB's phrase triggered...
Jack, veteran of the color war,
remembers the hospital as neutral territory
from 1969, when the neighborhood around it burned.
He senses that he's dying of cancer
but does not yet know for sure,
so his two wives, his friends, his doctor
urge him to keep up the labor of living.
"Drink water, drink water," they plead.
Not "Would you like," but "Can you eat another orange?"
"Everything tastes of hospital here," he says.
"Your minerals are still unbalanced," they tell him,
"it's as sweet and juicy as any orange north of Florida."
"I have to go, I have to go," he says
ten or twenty times a day, each time he wakes up.
"Untie me now before I wet the bed."
"That's the catheter. Let go--wide open--if you can;
it helps a little. No worries, man!
A clean sheet's right there, if you soil the bed."
Joe, veteran of Vietnam,
remembers the dying men begging for water
from 1969, when others died from loss of blood.
Nobody imagines that what he has is cancer
but what could cause a massive bleeding ulcer
in the worst possible place, they're trying to find out,
so his doctor ordered no food, minimal water,
and tied him to the bed next to Jack's bed.
(His doctor was born in 1976.)
"Water, water," he yells
five or ten times a day, each time he wakes up
from dreams of blood-soaked shrapnel on the ground.
"You don't get water," students yell around the door.
"I've not eaten in five days," he yells as the lunch trays pass.
"You're not meant to," the kid pushing the cart sasses.
"Change the bedpan! Clean the wound! Oh gawd, it hurts!"
"Only an R.N. or M.D. can clean that wound!
Don't touch him, lady! We could all get sued!"
(Jack's wife had started to offer Joe a pan of water,
watching Jack's vital signs spike when Joe screams.)
Only a curtain separates their beds,
about six feet apart, and when the students
are led in to observe the marrow test procedure
the curtain's rolled back; they perch on Joe's bed, too.
Both men wake up from nightmares lost, confused;
are tied so IV drips stay in their arms,
untied, once wide awake, to watch television
and wash themselves one-handed if they can.
"Let me go home to die in peace," Jack says
softly, while Joe is watching sports on TV.
"I liked lying on my own bathroom floor."
"But what if they can cure you?" says his wife.
"Well...I suppose I'd rather live...if they're sure I will.
Don't leave me alone for a single minute.
I saw those kids pawing through the closet
before they saw that you were there, and asked
if I still wanted clothes to go home in,
and I believe my roommate's killed a man--"
"In Vietnam, he meant. He had a nightmare."
"Don't leave me alone with him, in any case."
"I wrote your son: he can have all the money
if he comes back in time to make peace with you."
"I enlisted for the job, not for any of you
but you young whelps are worse than the Viet Cong!"
Joe yells, tied face down over a pan of filth.
"At least y'might help with the odor in here!
Don't youall smell it? What is wrong with you?
Is this America? I'm a combat veteran!
I've been a cop on the city's meanest streets!
I might have saved some of your worthless lives
for all you know! What happened to Black solidarity?
That foreigner over there gets food and water,
two gorgeous nurses fight to clean his back side,
and his doctor's come to see him three times today.
I was here sixty hours before I saw my doctor
if that kid is a doctor, which I doubt,
and all he says is 'No food, no getting up
while we run a few more tests.'"
"That wound of yours needs special treatment,"
the R.N. says when she comes in at last.
"Ouch! And when they send a nurse, a little girl!"
On the sixth day Joe's family come in.
"Tape the Super Bowl for me, will you?" he asks his son.
"We'll watch it together on your VCR
when I go home. They say I can go on Sunday."
What man won't watch the Super Bowl
when it comes on? Jack waits, drugged but not that dopey,
on Sunday afternoon, while Joe cranks up
the sound on a boring documentary
("For 'football widows' to manipulate their husbands?")
about life in an "exclusive" neighborhood
in a city a thousand miles away.
"No use watching anything else over that noise.
Anyway he's sure to watch the Super Bowl"....
Joe leaves at seven. The Super Bowl is over.
The team Jack wanted to cheer for has lost it.
"Not such a bad fellow," Jack and his wife
and doctor all agree. "That was smart revenge
instead of the violent kind, and who could blame him?"
"That for your juicy orange!" his mother-in-law says.
Jack even laughs, himself.
"If I'm dying of some obscure disease,"
Jack says, "will someone please tell Joe that."
None of his friends or relatives ever learn
Joe's real name, or his address.
All these years later...Joe, I hope you know
Jack died of cancer early that July.
I hope your family are all together
and all at peace.
I hope the bleeding man they left for dead
has told you, in a dream, that he forgives you.
I hope you'll do as much for me
another twenty years from now.
Whether in this world or in a better one
I'm absolutely certain you know, now,
that every person on the urology wing
would have done more for you, sooner, had they dared.
But must hospitals be so money-grubbing
they cram two patients into every room
and never think how that can feel, to patients?
------------------------------------------------------------
(end of "poem")
Gentle Readers, if this post struck a chord, it's probably because you know a disabled veteran. Please go and do something nice for that person now.
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