Richard M. Berlin, MD

"As Saint Francis put his hand on the creased forehead of the sow, and told her in words and in touch blessings of earth on the sow..."

"White roses, tiny and old, flare among thorns by the barn door..."

"As my daughter and I rehearse for the interview, I assure her no one asked me the cookie question..."

"Maybe the question is a test to uncover applicants who crumble under pressure, or a tactic to learn how much dough the future doctor hopes to earn..."

"It all depends on the child’s arrival..."

"The jackrabbit is a mild herbivore grazing the desert floor, quietly abridging spring..."

"There are a million birds in this city I hadn’t heard till now, each of them tuning their instruments, each of them singing, I am alive."

"I feel I’ve known him a long time, familiar as red in the maple outside or the smell of leather on my father’s skin..."

"And I feel closer to him than 50 minutes should allow, a puzzled sensation, I’ve known him all my life..."

"He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds Of the thick satin quilt of America.."

"The moon used to be on Zoloft, before trying Prozac, before adding Klonopin to her lunar chemistry."

"That life is real and if you can survive it, well, survive it well with love and art and meaning given where meaning’s scarce."

"All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise."

"Tell him I’m sorry I still owe him money..."

"$240. 47-year-old insurance salesman, depressed, alcoholic came in eight times, once with his wife."

"Doctors in their lonely rounds, Poets with their sacred sounds, Human kindness that abounds shout, nothing stops the spring."

"Was this what Rome felt like toward the end? When the colosseums filled with gladiators stirred the masses into a frenzy."

"Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful."

"I guessed heart failure. The answer was pneumonia."

"I stood by her side, stunned when her breathing stopped..."

"Suddenly, in every tree, an unseen nest where a mountain would be."

"Driving the Garden State Parkway to New York, I pointed out two crows to a woman who believed crows always travel in threes..."

"She walks in beauty, like the night, Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright, Meet in her aspect and her eyes..."

"It is the winter of chest pain and snow, all the drunks smashed through the ER doors..."

"When she steps onto the front porch, sun shimmies through the tips of her hair, the V of her legs, fans out like wings under her arms..."

"No matter, Hattie: It’s a long, beautiful walk into that flower-smothered standing ovation, so go on and make them wait."

"What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?"

"In my poem, says another, I can forget I am forgotten. Now I understand being misunderstood..."

"I begin by remembering my hours as a patient..."

"Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on..."