Hannah VanderHart
The Light Has Always Been Going Down
What: the quiet work of words. The doctors
and the nurses fleet as thought. The bindings
and loosenings. The basins with warm, clear
water. The sage and pine of the clean air.
The patient resting, positioned by a window.
In the evening there will be music, a small
glass filled with something warm, the orange
light painterly on a vase of tulips—the red ones
seeming to leap out of the dark. A book lies
nearby, with a marker in it. It is good.
The patient only puts it down to look
at the light. At the light on the tulips.
You can be sick, they think, and still
the tulips. Still the dark. The book is light
in their hands. The room is warm. The aim
has always been: do no harm, in this place.
In the place of the book and the tulips.
Even without visitors, the patient feels it.
This place has many rooms. The patient, also.
They put the book, the tulips, the light
inside them. The light has always been
going down. The dark always full of it.
Hannah VanderHart lives and teaches in Durham, NC. She has her MFA from GMU and is currently at Duke University writing her dissertation on gender and collaboration poetics in the seventeenth century. She has poems recently at UCity Review and Cotton Xenomorph, and forthcoming at The McNeese Review and Unbroken Journal. More at: hannahvanderhart.com
Return to March 2018 Edition
What: the quiet work of words. The doctors
and the nurses fleet as thought. The bindings
and loosenings. The basins with warm, clear
water. The sage and pine of the clean air.
The patient resting, positioned by a window.
In the evening there will be music, a small
glass filled with something warm, the orange
light painterly on a vase of tulips—the red ones
seeming to leap out of the dark. A book lies
nearby, with a marker in it. It is good.
The patient only puts it down to look
at the light. At the light on the tulips.
You can be sick, they think, and still
the tulips. Still the dark. The book is light
in their hands. The room is warm. The aim
has always been: do no harm, in this place.
In the place of the book and the tulips.
Even without visitors, the patient feels it.
This place has many rooms. The patient, also.
They put the book, the tulips, the light
inside them. The light has always been
going down. The dark always full of it.
Hannah VanderHart lives and teaches in Durham, NC. She has her MFA from GMU and is currently at Duke University writing her dissertation on gender and collaboration poetics in the seventeenth century. She has poems recently at UCity Review and Cotton Xenomorph, and forthcoming at The McNeese Review and Unbroken Journal. More at: hannahvanderhart.com
Return to March 2018 Edition