Visiting Hour

From the hospital solarium we watch row houses
change with evening down the avenue, the gardener

bending to red asters, his blond chrysanthemums.
Each day I learn more of the miraculous.

The gardener rocks on his heels and softly
Riva talks to me about the d.t.3, her gin

hallucinations. The willow on the lawn
is bare, almost flagrant in the wind off

Baltimore harbor. She wants me to brush her hair.
Some mornings I'd hear her sing to herself

numbers she knew by heart
from nightclubs on the waterfront circuit.

I wondered if she watched herself dissolve
in the mirror as shadows flickered, then whispering

gathered. Floating up the airshaft
her hoarse contralto broke over "I Should Care,"

"Unforgettable," and in that voice
everything she remembered--the passage

from man to man, a sequence of hands
undressing her, letting her fall like the falling

syllables of rain she loves, of steam, those trains
and ships that leave. How she thought for years

a departure or a touch might console her, if only
for the time it takes luck to change, to drink

...