Gravity loves you
One can see how each day can be colored or hued by merely deciding which miniscule part of it to include in an entry. So this is what will make this day remotely memorable for its decided mundaneity.
This morning, December the 2th, I drove my friend Perry to the doctor's office for some follow-up work. He had received a cortisone shot a month ago for a sore shoulder. While waiting in the place they make you wait, I wrote the following poem:
Ten Pound Shoes
Everyone wears them while being weighed at the doctor's. Some pull stones and bolts of raw copper from their pockets and make unnecessary apologies to the nurse who is interested only in how deeply gravity loves them.
She will tell them chidingly that clothes weigh only three or four pounds, so it behooves them to bring dispensable ballast for all the excuses of too much pie and jettison praise for the sedentary hours spent in blissful digestion.
This is the stuff of waiting rooms. At this very moment around the world, in cities, towns, villages, and pinspecks so small few maps have ever noted them, are rooms of concrete steel carpet wood glass linoleum tile sand mud straw flies and piped-in country Christian music singing the salvations of saddlery.
And in those rooms, waiting to see doctors, millions of patients are practicing patience. They sit and fidget over dog-eared magazines worn with the press of worry, sniffling and aching, ascending and declining with maladies mal and imagined. Physicans and boneprodders, curanderas and quacks, soulstitchers and shamans will get it done best they can.
Here in The Dalles, they'll get it done no matter how it turns out. Medicine is more about mystery than it is about miracle. But once in a while, what is beyond understanding makes itself known in part, enough so that magic avoids eviction and the holy name of hope is praised from awestruck and trembling lips.
So fill your pockets and lace up them ten pound shoes. Step lightly onto the scale. There are no fairer judges in this world than the nurses who weigh us.
Joseph Gallo
December 2, 2004
This morning, December the 2th, I drove my friend Perry to the doctor's office for some follow-up work. He had received a cortisone shot a month ago for a sore shoulder. While waiting in the place they make you wait, I wrote the following poem:
Ten Pound Shoes
Everyone wears them while being weighed at the doctor's. Some pull stones and bolts of raw copper from their pockets and make unnecessary apologies to the nurse who is interested only in how deeply gravity loves them.
She will tell them chidingly that clothes weigh only three or four pounds, so it behooves them to bring dispensable ballast for all the excuses of too much pie and jettison praise for the sedentary hours spent in blissful digestion.
This is the stuff of waiting rooms. At this very moment around the world, in cities, towns, villages, and pinspecks so small few maps have ever noted them, are rooms of concrete steel carpet wood glass linoleum tile sand mud straw flies and piped-in country Christian music singing the salvations of saddlery.
And in those rooms, waiting to see doctors, millions of patients are practicing patience. They sit and fidget over dog-eared magazines worn with the press of worry, sniffling and aching, ascending and declining with maladies mal and imagined. Physicans and boneprodders, curanderas and quacks, soulstitchers and shamans will get it done best they can.
Here in The Dalles, they'll get it done no matter how it turns out. Medicine is more about mystery than it is about miracle. But once in a while, what is beyond understanding makes itself known in part, enough so that magic avoids eviction and the holy name of hope is praised from awestruck and trembling lips.
So fill your pockets and lace up them ten pound shoes. Step lightly onto the scale. There are no fairer judges in this world than the nurses who weigh us.
Joseph Gallo
December 2, 2004
post-time 6:25 PM
2 Comments:
Beautiful. You're in your usual form: imaginer of words. Soulstichers is a new one on me.
See to it yours has no holes, my friend. ;-)
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