Impossible White Goat

St. Jerome in the Desert by Joachim Patinir

Before the diagnosis, I'd written nothing publishable for four years, but when I took the pencil up it seemed to set me free.

—Ciaran Carson

While Carson gets infusions in the hospital, I get mine at home. Insurance won'tcover the cost unless I let a nurse into my house. The paraphernalia has moved inpermanently, thwarting me from pretending I'm not really sick, surely not

sick enough to live with an IV pole and two boxes filled with syringes,blue gloves, needles, and an EpiPen. I prefer the hospital, to be a visitornot a resident, and to stretch my heart for those worse off. The medicine drips

into my hand. My left hand, sinistra, has small squiggly veins,while my right, destra, has pop-up veins large and straight as freeways.The hand I use is the hand they bruise. I'm compelled to notice hands.

St. Jerome in the Desert reveals the same liminal world of Landscapewith St. Jerome. This day is sunny, sky and river motionless.Jerome, still on the bottom edge, is prominent now, his tent againsta crag atop the hill. Jerome has set his book aside to look, amazed,

at a coral drape slung over a dead branch of a stump. A brimmed hatof matching color. Dry white twigs appear as a deformed handreaching for him. What's happened? At a disproportionate distance,someone rides a camel under a stone arch and a white goat is stranded

on sheer perpendicular rock unable to jump down. The focus is the emptycoral drape, but I look at Jerome's sinistra hand which he uses to pushhimself up from the rock floor while his destra hand, palm up, reachestenderly toward the dead twig. The space between is pure tension.

This is his own cardinal's hat and robe, yet he looks as though he's aboutto greet someone who suddenly died. After I drafted this poem, I mournedmy job. The coat I loved, the fabric of college, now shreddedby business models and checklists. Tap, tap, check. I teach bereft.