Painted Floor

Paint the floor with faces.
Scour their teeth.
Stroke their foreheads.
Powder their cheeks.
Search for thoughts in their eyes.

Your paintbrush sweeps
through a concert of smiles
in tones that wind back
like flowing hair
dissolved in the crotch of a morning.
Arms and feet of flutes and violins
waltz across the sticky floor.
Flugel-horns blurt Baroque.
Cellists display their bounding joy.

Choirs sigh and blur,
“Sleep ye on a walls. Watch
ye selves on the brand wet floor.”
Rhythms are a byte away,
glissandos smooth and tasty.

Perceptions

Each key of the piano
has a different tale to tell
in a different voice.
Dark glasses keep out
the truths of after-tones.
Hammers
beat sickles into bullets
packed in orange crates of Wheatees,
champions for breakfast.
Ho Mao, on toast with a goblet
of toadies and a stupor of juice.
Teeth walk around in fine suits
chomping on the news of the day.

Finding His Way

My friend has begun to die,
painfully shunning the call.

Spring has become the mordant
for the colors of his life,
lodged in the folds of his skin,
in the trabeculations of his heart.

Poppies, blanched white petals,
lavender tufts,
poppies, reduced to a liquor,
flux back and forth
through the worst of his pain.

Each night, his delusions glean
what his eyes cannot bear to see.

He dreams of a well
in a parched field.
He listens for the echoes
of a stone he drops
deflecting from the shale
that lines its chasm,
splashing in the pool below.

He grasps the winch,
creeps down the braided rope
to the bucket at the end,

repeats a song from childhood,
loosens his grip,
and falls unceremoniously
to the center of Earth.

back to issue

Gene Hirsch is a retired academic geriatrician who, for many years, has taught human values in patient care to medical students and doctors, recently at a hospice, with dying people.

He initiated and has taught in the writing program at John C. Campbell Folk School, Brasstown, NC, since 1992, when he co-founded NC Writers' Network West. He conducts seminars on subjects such as Expressing Human Need and Emotion, The Influence of Existential Meaning for the Poet.

Gene's poetry has been published in medical and non-medical journals such as: Pharos (Medical Honor Society), Journal of the American Medical Society, Consortium Ethics Program, Univ. of Pittsburgh, Fetishes (Univ. of Colorado), Hiram Poetry Review, Human Quest, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Anthologies include Atahita Journal, Blood & Bone (poems by physicians), Behavioral Medicine, Crossing Limits (Afro-American and Jewish poets), Tyranny of the Normal, and Echoes across the Blue Ridge. He produced five volumes of Freeing Jonah (poets of western NC). He is a member of the Pittsburgh Poetry Exchange.