Summary:

The poem's title refers to John Hunter Hospital, where Les Murray lay near death for three weeks as a result of a liver condition. He "turned yellow as the moon / and slid inside a CAT-scan wheel," then found himself emerging from a "time warp" of unconsciousness 20 days later. Murray reports that he is "the only poet whose liver / damage hadn't been self-inflicted."

He goes on to explain what had happened to make his liver rehearse "the private office of the grave." When he was over the crisis, he signed a "Dutch contract," presumably an advance directive of some sort. Surprisingly, surviving his bout of acute liver failure seemed to cure his other problem, "the Black Dog, depression." The poem ends with a paean of gratitude for "the project of seeing conscious life / rescued from death." [80 lines]

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The poet expresses pity for all the poor, poor animals--for dogs, for mice, for earthworms, even for the "protozoons / that sway their cilia / so desperately." On the other hand, "patients / with progressive amyotrophic lateral sclerosis can just / fuck off." They should go live in the world of Hieronymus Bosch. [21 lines]

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Summary:

This poem begins: "Move him into the sun." It has snowed overnight, but now it grows warmer. The sun has always awakened him before, but will it now? "Think how it wakes the seeds." It even gave life to "the clays of a cold star." Surely, there must be more warmth, more life, and more meaning than this. "O what made fatuous sunbeams toil / To break earth's sleep at all?" [14 lines]

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Summary:

Once in a while someone fights for breath. The crowd around him continues with its business, not realizing that inside the man there might be something drastic going on. There might be a sea monster growing, or a raven named Nevermore, or "a huge muteness of fairy tales," or "the wood-block baby that gobbles up everything." Medical tests show that the lung is vanishing and becoming "an abandoned room" in a queer world where "only surgeons / write poems." [34 lines]

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Summary:

This poem is a detailed description of a hospital, focusing on the patients waiting in the outpatient department. The detail proliferates about these "humans, caught / On ground curiously neutral, homes and names / Suddenly in abeyance." These people drink tea and read paperbacks as they wait "to confess that something has gone wrong."

Outside the hospital the world is different, almost unreal. Occasionally, a nurse comes and beckons a patient to come in. "Some will be out by lunch, or four; / Others, not knowing it, have come to join / The unseen congregations whose white rows / Lie set apart above . . . " [64 lines]

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Summary:

A nurse works at the bed of a child who is an accident victim: "She is not yet dead." Even though they are about to transport the child by helicopter, there is no question that she will die. The poet brings the reader into the immediacy of the moment in which she is listening to "the whisper of her blood pressure" and the "Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump." of the helicopter's blades. There is no way, though, to reach the child: " . . . I want to put / my arms around her, / tell her we are all terribly sorry for this . . . . "

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Summary:

The nurse reflects on the men in the room with "B" for "blood hazard" on their door. They are too weak to make love, but they still take care of one another: "as they press cool cloths to foreheads, / pass tissues for sticky green phlegm." Being only human, when she enters their room and they cough, she confesses that "something inside me stiffens." Yet she sees them as "half a butterfly on gray cement . . . . " She cares and she wants them to know that she cares, these men who "are migrating back to the cocoon, / the place where brown masks / protect the unbeautiful.

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Summary:

This poem of nine four-line stanzas reveals a father's observations as he sits in a support group for parents at the psychiatric hospital where his daughter is a patient. The poem moves from the nervous small talk shared by the parents to the half-heard sounds of a tennis match outside to the "hot potato" of pain that the parents, through their stories, pass around, bringing the reader into the immediacy of the blame, grief, and disbelief that these parents share. In this environment, words fail: "I don't know anything / That can help us all. Words alone / (How many words there were!) have come unstrung // And scatter everywhere."

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Summary:

Narrated in the third person, the poem is a telephone conversation between an adult son and his complaining mother. This is the mother's second phone call of the day to her son, who had spent several hours shopping for groceries with her earlier that same day.

She is tired, says the mother, and there is no food in the house worth eating. Replies the son, "Did you take your iron? He wanted to know. / He sincerely wanted to know. Praying daily, / hopelessly, that iron might make a difference." Food is a touchy subject--"it never brought them anything but grief."

Later the mother frets that she is afraid, "afraid of everything. Help me, please." If her son would only help her, then he could go back to "[w]hatever / it was that was so important / I had to take the trouble / to bring you into this world."

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Summary:

In this poignant poetic rendition of images presented to the narrator as she watches one of her body fluids ooze into an external receptacle, the reader is treated to a vivid array of symbols brought to the poet's imagination. The fluid is lymph, collected into a "little plastic pouch / hung on my side like a monkey." The poem is made up of run-on three line stanzas, flowing like the fluid--from color images, to visions of the sea, to associations with the aroma of fruit.

As the poem progresses, the narrator shifts from the reality of what it means to wear the collection device and empty and measure its contents, to the metaphors of fluid: the narrator is submerged, "I speak from inside / an aquarium," contemplates the metaphysics of the fluid milieu of the human body, "Who knows what's going on / beneath the skin. . ." And yet, the poet-narrator concludes, for their apparent significance, once the body fluids are spilled, the "gates opened," they become irrelevant as they dry into "sticky specks."

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