At the doctors.

By jasperhatsoff

Mon, 10 Sep 2012
  • 869 reads
5 comments
 

‘I left the house without a scarf today.’
I say. She smiles and, encouraged, add;
‘Yesterday in Ayr it was 12 degrees.’
and throw in some incidental detail,
like the price of daffodils,
or the nub of a crocus I saw on my way here,
newborn ears folded together.
Wet from birth.
She bites her lip in concentration and,
on cue,
I assume the kind of distracted expression
which can only mean
I am assembling
a shopping list,
or thinking about the fact
I need to change
my duvet cover,
or making plans for the future.
When really, I am only looking
at the way the light from the
bare bulb above
hits the laminated sign
beside the sink, which says
‘Please wash your hands’
in no-nonsense black ink.
This is the procedure I carefully
follow, while she, cautious now,
lays her instruments upon
white cotton
and asks me what I had for breakfast
‘A croissant’, I say
and she hits the vein.

Certificate U
Poem
Miscellaneous

Comments

Submitted by The Walrus on
'I say. She smiles and, encouraged, add;' Should this be 'adds?' Apart from that little typo (we all make them) this is another nice piece, jasperhatsoff, and it's so true to life.

Submitted by jasperhatsoff on
Err yeah I realise it's a bit grammatically confusing. It's not 'adds', as it's the same person speaking; the narrator is adding to what she has just said...I could say 'I add', but I thought that sounded a bit clumsy...

Submitted by The Walrus on
Aah, I see. Personally I would put it like this - ‘I left the house without a scarf today,’ I say. She smiles and I, encouraged, add ‘Yesterday in Ayr it was 12 degrees.’ (I would omit the semicolon after 'add,' you don't need it). To me that reads much better, but I should hang on before you change anything and see what other folk think. It would be a shame if your readers misunderstand your meaning at the very beginning of the poem, because otherwise it's a very strong, thoughtful piece of writing.

Submitted by jasperhatsoff on
Yes, that does sound better actually. Thanks for the advice! It's something my mind has snagged momentarily upon everytime I've read it, so glad I've found a solution! Jane

Submitted by The Walrus on
I wouldn't bother commenting on your work if I didn't think that it had merit - I have one of those minds that stubbornly switches off when I read junk, you see. If I think that someone's stuff is completely hopeless I slink away without leaving any tracks whatsoever because, I guess, I can't see the point of wasting my time compiling a list of suggestions that the writer will more than likely ignore. That especially applies to the (thankfully few) writers on this site who believe that they're too good for even the slightest criticism from mere mortals which, hopefully, comes from a genuine desire to improve the work in question rather than a gleeful need to pick flies. There are so many times that I've struggled to say what I really want to say in the deepest, maybe the darkest part of my heart and I can't quite make it sound right (especially in poetry, which I find much more difficult to write than stories), but then someone says "hang on, have you considered trying this?" The thing is, I reckon, our brains sometimes freeze when we go over a piece a dozen or more times, and a fresh pair of eyes is always helpful. The same thing applies with typos - I miss a few no matter how many times I edit. On the whole, even the most accomplished writers on here welcome folk pointing glitches out. When you have a mo look up the poems of Reagan Wiles here on Abc - they're so achingly beautiful that they bring tears to my eyes.