Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, October 19, 2008

In this election year when the cost of health care looms large for most of us, anybody would profit from reading this sad lyric by Roger Fanning, an only child who nursed both parents to their expensive graves within a single year.

Hospital Sidewalk

In this hospital they itemize the cost

of a person's deathbed down to the last aspirin.

They charge twenty-five dollars for fake lamb's wool

on which, after surgery, patients bleed.

People die with eyes fixed on digital clocks

which flip numbers every minute, dollar signs flying.

So adroit is Fanning's wizardry with the vernacular that this sounds almost ordinary at first glance, like a complaint overheard on the bus. But listen to the artistry here: the first two lines with their hissing "s" sounds (itemiZe, person'S, laSt aSpirin), and the imagery -- "fake lamb's wool" (like the redemption of a false "lamb" or Christ), the eyes fixed on digital clocks, the sleight-of-hand in which numbers morph into dollar signs.

In the second stanza of this gem, Fanning goes from general gripes to a specific hospital where he's paying the bill and is inconsolable:

The sidewalk out front has blades of grass

shooting up through cracks. A ladybug

(not much bigger than a decimal point) could climb

to the highest tip and fly away home

to save her children. I wonder if little things comfort

anyone. Not me. The business of love is living big.

This speaker can't be comforted by the tiny pin-dot ladybug who wants to rescue her children, yet paradoxically he enjoins us to love big by observing the small.

Another unlikely survivor touches me in his poem "Frog."

My car passed over him but I could see

in the rearview mirror he was okay.

Then again, is a thing so soft ever safe?

Contemplating the frog's vulnerability, the speaker continues on his way:

I drove on to sit by a bed in Intensive Care,

where my father slept among machines. As if grateful

for wet grass, the frog wept with all his skin,

so happy, so helpless: not dead, not dead.

Fanning's sonic diction recreates the frog's ribbet-ribbet rhythm in the last two metrical feet: NOT dead, NOT dead. Undoubtedly, that's what the son's heart is hoping.

"Hospital Sidewalk" and "Frog" are from "The Island Itself" (Penguin, 1991).

Mary Karr has published four books of poems, most recently "Sinners Welcome."