Through poetry, readers can experience a kind of time travel. A poem might transport us into the past, into the future, or even, most uncannily, into the timeless. The poem “Filial,” with its painterly imagery, creates such a still-life depiction of caregiving. The speaker invites readers to bear witness with him, showing the paradoxically beautiful reality of family life disrupted by illness. Exhaustion, substance use, and care coordination efforts commingle with golden light and the quiet pleasure of reading as medicine and art intersect. The poem’s tension between the clinical and the lyrical builds as it moves away from the vivid present and prognosticates a grim future of medical complications and death. Yet the intensity of perception emphasizes staying in the moment through the anchoring internal rhyme structure, while the detailed portrayal of physical surroundings also adds to this keen situational awareness. The final image, of a loved one in reflection, “head bent, intent,” while bathed in sunlight, recalls the breathtaking intimacy of a Vermeer interior. Whenever the poem wanders into medical questions and uncontrollable scenarios—what condition does the patient have, are there complications, how much time is left—we are deftly returned to what is right now, in the present, and become absorbed by how encountering art offers hope for a kinder, more humane end of life. The poem brings us back to the loved one before us, who is still living, almost glowing in translucence, a light that may be slowly fading but remains resplendent—and that still, and always, exists.
Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, beloved for his poetry of memory and reconciliation, once remarked in an interview, “My poems always start in some kind of memory…like a little beeper going off in your mind.” Perhaps because insistent memory so often sparks it, poetry remains a primary medium for exploring difficult themes we might prefer to forget, ironically or not, such as dementia. In “Bedtime,” the speaker recalls a nursery rhyme, itself a kind of poem, that prompts writing about her dislike of caring for a spouse with Alzheimer disease. With the epigraph’s churlish chorus “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,/the reason why I cannot tell” (once read to her children at their bedtime) jangling in her overtired mind, she recounts in detail the frustration of “resistance to bedtime routines” and “your crankiness, your curse words” that tending to her addled husband engenders. Yet just as it instigates the reliving of misery, poetry also creates a healing inflection point. The speaker unexpectedly moves past resentment: “…washing/the damn dishes, mopping the fonder checkerboard floor.//What on this blessed ailing earth is this attachment/after visits to dementia Hell?” The poem’s turn, or volta, in the penultimate couplet—“every good poem has one,” that moment when diction shifts and insight is distilled from narration—delivers her, and us, instead into a state of reconciliation. Poetry’s magic finally redeems this troubled couple as they drift off to sleep together, hands clasped tenderly.
Poetry often provides insightful glimpses into our lives through creating relatable characters whose soliloquies project their thoughts as to conflicts and destiny, captivating audiences. Such singular voices help us navigate disparate aspects of our own experiences, offering new perspectives and even warning us against looking only inwardly. In “Reflex to Light,” a clinical trainee dramatically voices medicine’s omnipresent challenge of finding work-life balance. The frantic monologue, punctuated only by “blink blink blink,” shows how personal experience clashes with professional demands. We imagine the speaker on what feels like a runaway train, traveling afar to meet a friend while trying to memorize anatomy flash cards. The multitasking becomes almost comedic as the speaker jumps from physiologic seeing (via optic nerve function) to the visions of tarot cards. A reference to a death predicates the significance of the speaker’s card pull, perhaps the Nine of Swords, which holds up a sobering caution to all medicine’s unseeing workaholics: “That woman sitting upright in bed,/sobbing into her hands, invisible eyes,/and everything has passed her by.” Such an admonitory message can be difficult to envision and even harder to accommodate. How can we slow down and enjoy life when we have so many “stupid word[s]” to learn? Poetry flips a new type of card for us, distinct from our usual busywork. Speaker and reader are left together at the crossroads of the poem’s conclusion, as we wonder whether our fate is sealed—or we can still change.
