Elixir
Lewis Warsh

What matters most my friends are gone

See their faces, hear them speak

"I have so many regrets," he said

Ice cream, he wanted ice cream

The nurse brings me a cup of cold orange sherbet

The first thing I've eaten in days

Shklovsky's Third Factory and Alice's For the Ride

On my bedside table

I woke up thinking I was in my own bed

Shelley, the night nurse, brings me a pitcher of ice water

Everyone has a pathology—I was angry for a long time

And I didn't know why

In the middle of a fight

She put her hand through a French window

We had to take a taxi to the ER at St. Vincent's

It takes years to figure out who you are

When the surgery is over you open your eyes

You must sign a consent form, you must sign your life away

Soon I will leave the hospital and walk down the street like any stranger

Once I arrived without asking at her house in the middle of night and she let me in

There's no one around to witness these moments

There's no one here except Shelley the night nurse

The last time I was in the hospital my roommate was Lee Konitz

He died soon after—I read it in the newspaper

I listened to him sing to himself in his sleep

My roommate was discharged earlier in the day, so I'm alone

Visiting hours 3-7, we'll talk on the phone

I see all the faces of my friends every day

I met Larry Fagin in the back of Gino & Carlo, a bar in San Francisco, 1963

I played chess and drank beer with Lee Harwood in my apartment in Cambridge

"You can go home on Friday," the doctor says, "no reason to stay here any longer"

He called Katt after the surgery to assure her everything went well

Bill Corbett was the best man at my wedding in the country, 1975

You can begin a sentence with a capital letter and end with a period, or not

Bill Berkson and I embraced one last time outside EJ's, May 2016

I told Ted Greenwald I would "See him soon" and he said "You better come back tomorrow"

The last time I saw Joanne Kyger was after her reading at DIA, "Oh Lewis!

I ate lunch with Bill Kushner at Le Grainne and I knew something was wrong

I'm writing from Lenox Hill, my bed near the window

Soon the light will come up over the city

The night nurse, Shelley, will bring me a Percocet, maybe two

And no doubt Dr. Newman and his team will visit and the day nurses will arrive

"Think of the most beautiful place," the anesthesiologist says as he puts me under

And my mind goes blank

Katt's face as I step from the shower and she dries my back and shoulders

My scrawny shoulders

                                                                   Thursday 4 A.M.
                                                                    June 11, 2020

from the book ELIXIR / Ugly Duckling Presse

https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-elixir-lewis-warsh-6078452?e=6ec42bce63

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