Hospital Window

At gauzy dusk, thin haze like cigarette smoke 
ribbons past Chrysler Building's silver fins 
tapering delicately needletopped, Empire State's 
taller antenna filmed milky lit amid blocks 
black and white apartmenting veil'd sky over Manhattan, 
offices new built dark glassed in blueish heaven--The East 
50's & 60's covered with castles & watertowers, seven storied 
tar-topped house-banks over York Avenue, late may-green trees 
surrounding Rockefellers' blue domed medical arbor-- 
Geodesic science at the waters edge--Cars running up 
East River Drive, & parked at N.
Y.
 Hospital's oval door 
where perfect tulips flower the health of a thousand sick souls 
trembling inside hospital rooms.
 Triboro bridge steel-spiked 
penthouse orange roofs, sunset tinges the river and in a few 
Bronx windows, some magnesium vapor brilliances're 
spotted five floors above E 59th St under grey painted bridge 
trestles.
 Way downstream along the river, as Monet saw Thames 
100 years ago, Con Edison smokestacks 14th street, 
& Brooklyn Bridge's skeined dim in modern mists-- 
Pipes sticking up to sky nine smokestacks huge visible-- 
U.
N.
 Building hangs under an orange crane, & red lights on 
vertical avenues below the trees turn green at the nod 
of a skull with a mild nerve ache.
 Dim dharma, I return 
to this spectacle after weeks of poisoned lassitude, my thighs 
belly chest & arms covered with poxied welts, 
head pains fading back of the neck, right eyebrow cheek 
mouth paralyzed--from taking the wrong medicine, sweated 
too much in the forehead helpless, covered my rage from 
gorge to prostate with grinding jaw and tightening anus 
not released the weeping scream of horror at robot Mayaguez 
World self ton billions metal grief unloaded 
Pnom Penh to Nakon Thanom, Santiago & Tehran.
 
Fresh warm breeze in the window, day's release 
>from pain, cars float downside the bridge trestle 
and uncounted building-wall windows multiplied a mile 
deep into ash-delicate sky beguile 
my empty mind.
 A seagull passes alone wings 
spread silent over roofs.
 

- May 20, 1975 Mayaguez Crisis 

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