Summary:

Like the train images in the last two stanzas, this poem is a train of thoughts about medicine, doctors, and patients' relationships to doctors, medicine and illness. The poem begins with the narrator's (presumably the poet's) Chinese doctor writing a prescription in Chinese. The poet begins daydreaming about the characters, and this leads to a soliloquy about daydreaming and illness and the slower pace of the ill, hanging "suspended in the wallpaper" of waiting rooms.

A recollection of the poet's "lady doctor" and his infatuation with her leads to a revelation of his desire to have illness and suffering, just to be with her. He philosophizes "suffering itself is medicine / and to endure enough will cure you / of anything." He decides he'd like to suffer like his mother, who seemed to not only accept, but also relish, the sick role of the weak, dependent state.

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Summary:

Magda Danvers, the brilliant English professor and scholar of Blake, is dying of cancer, "the Great Uncouth . . . my final teacher." The novel tracks the course of her illness and her husband, Francis's (who is a former Roman Catholic seminarian) untiring care of her until the end. In addition, the deteriorating marriage of Alice (who has just suffered a miscarriage) and the novelist Hugo Henry is examined alongside of Magda's and Francis's as Alice befriends Magda and Francis throughout the final course of Magda's illness.

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Summary:

This narrative poem relates the speaker's memory of neighborhood boys tying her and a friend "spread-eagled" to a garage door and teasing them in a way that borders on being sexually threatening. The speaker tried (and eventually succeeded) in convincing the boys to let her and her friend go. The poem subtly explores the shifting relations between girls and boys--and between girls and themselves--on the border of childhood and adulthood, focusing on the tensions of girls moving from seeming sexlessness to sexuality and womanhood, and the prices that might entail.

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Summary:

This brief poem describes a revelatory conversation the speaker has with her dying brother "The last time we had dinner together in a restaurant . . . ." Her brother takes her hands into his, and asks if she really understands that he will die soon. The speaker assures him that she does, hinting at an inner acceptance the brother questions. He then turns the tables on her (and on the reader) by suggesting that what she really needs to accept is that she herself will die someday--and that until she understands this, she cannot really comprehend the reality of his dying.

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Summary:

Narrated by Jake Baker, a 73-year-old who'd been sent to a nursing home by his niece, this novel recounts the adventures of Jake and Lucas Kraft after they leave a nursing home to become cowboys. Lucas is a writer whose pessimistic view of life is the opposite of Jake's. Never able to tell the truth about himself, Lucas has lost both fame and love but not his lust for life.

The two men hitchhike west (with a series of crazy drivers) and eventually find jobs on a Texas ranch. Jake falls in love with Betty, perhaps the foulest-mouthed cook ever invented; Lucas finds Sally Crandall, his ex-wife, a movie star, and the love of his life, who's performing in a cowboy-and-Indians movie not far from the ranch. Jake and Lucas actually do become cowboys (in the movie).

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Summary:

This mystery novel, set in Chicago, centers on a nursing home called The Larkspur. Chips Devlin is, after the death of his housekeeper, placed in The Larkspur by a relative. Chips has been a mentor to Jimmy Flannery, who tries to find out why Chips has been so hastily put there.

Nosing around through Chicago's political and public service offices. Jimmy calls in favors and hands them out in an effort to learn what's really going on at The Larkspur, the 3-story converted mansion with a big back yard (complete with duck pond). After an elderly man who Jimmy had asked to be a lookout is murdered, Jimmy kidnaps Chips from The Larkspur but can't keep himself from trying to help those that remain by solving the murder.

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Summary:

Ann Blake is a lonely, divorced, childless English teacher whose ninth grade class includes Karen, a girl who is dying of cancer ( probably lymphoma). As an adjunct to the medical treatment and prayer/faith healing that the child receives, Ann hopes that she might instill in Karen a purpose to live for, through her creative writing

The Infinite Dark refers to a story the students read during that school year, and the teacher ponders on what this phrase really means. She has assumed it means death, but, as Karen regains her health and moves on to another grade and forgets about Ann Blake, Ann realizes that for herself the infinite dark means being unconnected from others, being alone, not making an impact that is permanent--a sort of death in life. As the teacher tries to facilitate healing in the student she ironically realizes that she herself has known little about living her own life.

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Summary:

This essay is told from the perspective of an ophthalmologist who was consulted about a patient who had blurry vision. She is told by his internist that he has cancer but the family does not want him to know it. She plays along with the deception and does not inform the patient that his vision problems are from brain metastases. By serendipity she later learns that the patient knows his diagnosis but is playing along with the deception so as not to hurt his family. She is relieved to finally talk with him openly about his disease and his prognosis.

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Summary:

A psychiatrist who is skilled at hypnotism is asked by an oncologist to hypnotize a difficult patient prior to a bone marrow biopsy. The psychiatrist is able to achieve excellent pain relief through hypnotism, much to her own surprise. She is exhausted by the mental energy she has expended in this experience, and is discredited by the oncologist, who doesn't really believe that hypnotism is anything special.

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Summary:

A physician recounts the experience of caring for a small child with an incurable disease. The father brings in a bright stuffed dinosaur for the child and despite all expectations, the child opens one eye and reaches for the toy, then lapses back into a coma. The family and physicians cry together. A week later the child dies. The narrator uses this example to argue that it is the intensity of a physician's experiences and the privilege of being a part of them, rather than whether or not the experience is happy, that gives medicine its meaning and satisfaction.

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