Hospital

What I never get used to is the odor
that rises from the rooms as if  a syringe
of blood and bile and bleach, or the music
or should I say muttering from the TVs, a gauze
of game show chatter, a victim in a wheelchair
murdered on “Law & Order,” the rant of a legal-aid

yelling, “My client is innocent!” The nurses-aid
comes to check your vitals. She smells of patchouli
and hand sanitizer. Nurses and family push wheelchairs
through the halls. The nurse comes with a syringe
of morphine you’ve been bitching about, a gauze
for your pain for a few hours. Someone screams

down the hall, over and over “You’re killing me.” A voice
masked by pain. How pain asks, how pain takes. Your aid
arrives to check your vitals. The special gauze
that won’t stick to your wounds. The years the odor
from your wound filled the room. The nurse rinses
your foot, changes the bandage. The aid brings the wheelchair

and we are home wearing the odor, You call me a Welcher,
say we bet you’d be home a day later. What is more than the sound
of our daughters running to you? Maybe the silence of the syringe
bringing morphine on the worst nights, the soft shoes of the nurse
entering the room, her quiet departure, and you fade in the smell
of sanitizer that deepens into our clothes, wraps its gauze

around our bodies. Our daughters carefully wrap the gauze
of their arms around you, help you from the wheelchair.
Later you sit up, we limp to the bathroom, carefully wash the odor
of the hospital off with a sponge and soap. Later you snore 
lightly in our bed, the absence of your body still hovers. The nurse
I knew from my work at another facility, who brought your syringe

on time, who told me they are trained to bring the pain syringe
later each time. She says, “I sounds cruel.”  Her voice is a gauze
I hear when we arrive and she is working. She was a good aid
where I worked, middled aged, spent big money on a fancy wheelchair
for her father, so he could drive himself for walks. We carry the sound
of the voices we love into our hands for strangers, we bear the odor

of the dead, and rinse the wheelchairs, aids wash off the stench
of shit and urine, and you my love are the gauze that keeps me
laboring for the sound of your voice, against the final syringe.