The Red Letters
In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.
To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.
––Steven Ratiner
Red Letter Poem #286
The ER
for Steve and Patsy
It was COVID-time, so the phone was all I had.
“Gotta go,” I’d tell Patsy or Steve
each time someone pushed past the pale green sheet
delimiting my cubicle.
I must have been helped or surveilled or tested or moved or advised
by two dozen people while I was there.
Most did their best with their mini-moment in my life
one aide’s arm even had “SIBI”
tattooed in blue
which is Latin for ‘to or for them’, i.e., others;
what a motto for a medic!
But as a whole the great space jammed
with computers and desks and beds and equipment and people
leaned down with expert indifference
and dealt with what ailed me moderately well. Now I
who used to take no pills at all (and made a thing of it)
take a tiny pink pill each night.
Remember me, the ER sighs as darkness falls.
I whisper back, I do.
Good, it says. I have forgotten you.
––Linda Bamber
All I want is to be on channel 12! It’s what I kept telling myself––a soothing mantra during a three-day hospital stay. Two decades in the rearview, but the effect on me is enduring. I’d experienced some sort of “brain event” (in the doctors’ remarkably bland parlance), and they were performing endless tests and scans on me, seeking the source of the problem. Time on a hospital ward is stressful, to say the least––but forced isolation is far from a curse for a poet. I remember busily writing and reading for hours each day––though the poems were tinged with the red of existential threat: the fear that a more encompassing stroke might mark this as my last poem, my last night.... When bored, I’d watch television on a small monitor suspended from the ceiling. Flipping through the few available stations, I came to channel 12 which was, I soon realized, the feed from a simple video camera mounted on the hospital roof and trained on tree-lined Memorial Drive and the Charles River below us. Now and then, I’d lie in bed watching the stop-and-go traffic, recalling the frustration it always produced. I’d see joggers in skimpy shorts, determinedly striding on the footpath––going over to-do lists in their minds, perhaps, or what they’d like for dinner. Beech trees. Ducks on the water. A solitary rower. The view presented the workaday, the trivial. Few, if any, of the folk who appeared briefly on that video seemed to be overjoyed with the knowledge that they were not sick, not endangered, not thinking of a last poem or a last anything. If I could be there on channel 12, back in the stream of ‘ordinary life,’ I promised myself I’d remain forever grateful.
When Linda Bamber sent me today’s poem, it felt like meeting a fellow citizen from the old country, from a select sister/brotherhood whose members carried a special mortal understanding. Of course, the situation she’s recounting in her poem was, in some respects, very different than mine: in the heart of Covid (you may or may not remember––or want to), everyone was afraid, everyone was (at least occasionally) considering the fragility of human existence, scrolling through the roster of precious moments and much-loved faces whose loss would be devastating. Many of Linda’s poems are built around modulating tone of voice, the many ways our spoken expression can color the written, and imbue it with a vibrant, and seemingly ‘un-literary’ sort of vitality. For example, when the speaker offhandedly punctuates her phone calls with “Gotta go,” we register both the breezy farewell but also the dark humor implied by that inevitable fact of life. A wealth of small telling details accrues in her poems, conveying the actuality of lived experience. Take, for example, the speaker’s sanctuary––only a curtained cubicle––but in those frantic days, when hospitals struggled to care for the flood of patients, even this was a reason for gratitude. Then there are those little litanies like “helped or surveilled or tested or moved or advised,” hinting at the profuse medical apparatus of a crowded Emergency Department. And wasn’t that ‘SIBI’ tattoo on the arm of an aide a marvelous observation (imagining the conversation it must have engendered)? It underscored the selfless nature of this hospital staff. “what a motto for a medic” indeed!
Linda is the author of a collection of poems (Metropolitan Tang) and a work of fiction (Taking What I Like)––both published by David R. Godine. She’s now retired from a successful career as an English Professor at Tufts University. Linda continues to write fiction, essays, and reviews, appearing in such places as The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Nation, and The New York Times. It would please me to think that the three new poems which have begun appearing in the Red Letters are a harbinger of a second full-length volume of poetry. I find her voice lifts my spirits in these troubled times. The quiet epiphanies that often close her poems feel real and attainable. Here, that “tiny pink pill” serves as the daily reminder of this hard-earned knowledge. “Remember me, the ER sighs as darkness falls.” And after reading Linda’s account, I suspect neither she nor I will easily allow these memories to fog over with time. “I whisper back, I do.” (certainly a seemly response). “Good, it says. I have forgotten you.” Why do we feel both a sting and a blessing in that final line? Perhaps it hints at the dispassionate nature of this medical institution, where every life requiring care is equally valued. And once they are discharged? The evening I was released from Mt. Auburn Hospital, I raced into Boston to attend a new friend’s poetry reading. Driving along that length of Memorial Drive, I almost forgot to look up––such is the powerful momentum of normalcy. But I was back on channel 12! And is Linda. As are (I sincerely hope) you.
The Red Letters
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