This is a lovely poem about an elderly married couple who share a room at a nursing home. The woman is confined to bed because her backbone is "so thin / the doctor jokes that X-rays can't find it." Her husband's mind is gone. The woman reflects on the morning activities, especially those of the "night girl" who brings the breakfast trays and, later, bends down to take her husband's tray, "the perfume / still lingering from whatever went on / before last night's shift." The woman asks herself: How would this young girl of 20 know that the two elderly people she is caring for once "made love / in the sweetfern high on an island."
The patient is lying on the table under an x-ray machine. He observes carefully the details of the machine above him--the three cables, the "crayon’s nose-cone," the traces of the electric tape that once bound the darker cable to the others. Now it is held by "serrated plastic ties." Everything is ready to "look into / whatever’s next, whatever it is I’m in for." What will appear on the film does not appear outside "under plain old sky," where it is "just beginning to snow."
