Closed like confessionals, ambulances weave through the city. One of them might come to rest anywhere. When that happens, the onlookers momentarily see "a wild white face that overtops / Red stretcher blankets" as the patient is taken into the ambulance.
Suddenly, just for a moment, they "sense the solving emptiness / That lies just under all we do." The onlookers whisper in distress. But the ambulance moves on, the traffic parts to let it by, and "dulls to distance all we are." [30 lines]
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]
