MEDICAL ARTS: The Gift of Poetry

Catharine Clark-Sayles, MD

After high school I stopped writing poetry, feeling that it was not a pastime for a serious scientist. At 40, with the sense that I had lost part of my 20s, I began studying writing with encouragement from writer/gastroenterologist Dr. David Watts and his wife Joan Barranow, a poet who now chairs the English department at Dominican University in San Rafael. I also took a class in poetry at Book Passage in Corte Madera with Margaret Kaufman, who continues as a mentor.

Most summers I try to attend a writing workshop--a sort of summer camp for poets. Since 2003, Dr. Watts has organized a workshop for people writing about health and healing. The workshop began as “Writing the Medical Experience” but has since been renamed “The Healing Art of Writing.” It started at Squaw Valley, moved to Sarah Lawrence College, and is now at Dominican University. The next conference will be in June 2011. For doctors, nurses or anyone interested in writing about medicine, the workshop offers a chance to meet with others passionate about writing and to share ideas and inspiration. (For workshop details, visit www.dominican.edu/events/healingart.)

Poetry is a gift, and I am glad to have rediscovered it. I can lose myself for hours while rearranging words into something pleasing. When I think a poem has come together, I experience a lovely euphoria that may fade by the next dawn when revision begins.

I enjoy publication and reading my work in public. Poetry has introduced me to a vibrant community of other writers. I think it has taught me to listen better and made me more sensitive to the unspoken messages from my patients.

* * *

I wrote the following sonnet at the Sarah Lawrence workshop several years ago, and it was published in the December 2011 issue of Spillway magazine. I like using the language and stories of medicine in poetry, and I have a series of poems with glass or window imagery. They may become a manuscript someday.

Pressing to the Glass

In the eternal un-night of the intensive care unit

surrounded by chirps and bleeps and blares of alarm,

sleeping bodies press against the glass of night

uncertain if they are looking in or out, a charm

of figures writ in light on screens overhead.

Nurses in their Saturday scrubs, the chili-pepper print,

talking midnight pot-luck plans, move bed to bed

checking, turning, emptying bags, unconscious of the din

until the ventilators fall into synch: breath in, breath out

and for a space of seconds, no alarms, not one bell

as even the nurses breathe as one, knowing, just about,

of the balance where we all stand, and who may tell,

breath in, breath out, how many million make a life,

as through the window a gibbous moon rides down the night.

* * *

The next poem came out of an exercise at the Dominican University conference using the form of repeated lines beginning with if, followed by lines beginning with I will not, followed by lines beginning with I will. The poem just seemed to appear with very little revision.

The exercise was presented by John Fox, who regularly teaches seminars in poetic medicine. The poem was published in 2011 in The Healing Art of Writing, an anthology from the University of California Press. Although I do not enjoy being called into the ER late at night, there are certain intangible benefits.

Night Call

If you are in need and it is midnight,

if I leave my bed for the cold darkness,

if I stumble on the step, drive yawning to the ER,

if the light is fluorescent and numbing

and there are cries of despair from the next bed,

I will not resent more than a little

my dream forever gone, not curse you

for the warmth cooling beneath my quilt.

I will not hold you accountable

for the missing hour of sleep.

I will love the crescent moon, the sudden deer

and the hustling skunk on my street as I return.

I will love this midnight world.

I will love my skill.

I will love your need.

* * *

Not all my poems are medically themed. My current project is a series of poems with themes from Halloween and old horror movies. I started the series after spending a Halloween evening at a hotel in Seattle where all the wait-staff were dressed as dead celebrities. “Psycho” is a departure in style for me, with short fragmented lines meant to reproduce the “cuts” of that famous shower scene. The poem was published online last October on the website Locuspoint.org.

Psycho

Afterwards, none of us

     showered quite the same.

Black and white film

     chocolate syrup blood;

Janet screamed,

     the water poured,

a shriek of violins.

Two minutes, forty-eight

     seconds, seventy-four cuts

changed what made us

     afraid.

* * *

My practice is mostly geriatrics, and dementia is one of the more difficult illnesses I treat. Poetry provides a way to remember and grieve for folks who have become dear over many years. The following poem will be in my new book Lifeboat, coming out from Tebot Bach Press this year.

To a Poet Lost to Alzheimer

You also flew on wings you built yourself,

Fragile pinions plumed with verse.

How you stretched to reach the sky!

But I keep imagining the terror as the first feather

Blew away and all around the wax softening with sun.

Did you think then of landing? Did you know already

There was no time and see the glory of a fall

Through closing dark, a comet trail to mark your path?

Icarus was fortunate to drown,

A broken body mourned and put away.

You go on and on, a sad and broken thing,

And you have forgotten that you ever flew.

* * *

The poem below will also be in Lifeboat. It came out of a momentary encounter with a straggly rose bush while I was waiting for a traffic light to change. I like juxtapositions of unlikely images and contradictions of ideas.

Gift

Someone has shown unreasoned hope

to plant a rose on the median strip;

they’ve buried prickled sticks then waited

out winter storms and gridlock fumes

for green and petalled shades of pink--

it looks like Peace, an editorial choice

for brake squeal, horns and thumping stereo bass.

No one rolls a window down to sniff, but bees

ride down monoxide trails to yellow dust and nectar:

strange vintage laced with a taste of MBTE.

We take what we are given.

Exhaust-soaked air and windshield glare,

a face contorted through the glass:

driver of a silver Jaguar caught,

some urgency delayed by a slow red light.

He mouths a silent curse and pounds his wheel.

I think how like that rose we live: unconscious

of intersections of light and speed;

the acid of what we need; the shine of what is given.

---

Dr. Clark-Sayles is a Greenbrae geriatrician.

Email: clarksayles@aol.com