Richard M. Berlin, MD

Always ask the name of their dog.

They ask me to sign the moment before my poetry reading and I comply...

We fled the computer room like inmates after lightning fries the prison fence. Then we rounded with nurses who knew the doses and what made patients moan...

Do I have to speak? I know you know...

I’ve been waiting for one of those nine bare-breasted sisters to land by my side and inspire a sonnet...

The Monarch’s cortex, head of a pin, contains maps of Earth and heavens within...

They love to talk like air traffic controllers: “Angle the spinal needle 20 degrees and push gently toward the midline.” And though I don’t say “Roger”...

Homeless men in Chinatown doorways flick cigarettes and cough, while a dozen nurses forge into Beach Street winter...

Covering for a colleague I begin to startle after the tenth call-med refill requests, side effect questions, and suicidal thoughts...

Rotten teeth, dirt creased face, he’d come in for a hot and a cot and collapsed with DTs...

All summer southwest wind stirs the weeping willows the way my breath disturbs a settled life when I whisper the cancer diagnosis...

Soaked in Mexican sunshine he’s powered back to the Berkshires, all the world’s yellow compressed into a firecracker...

I wanted this to be like a fairy tale walk in the woods before kids, careers, blood clots and bone mets...

Green hills patched with April, snow and I’ve chosen to celebrate. with a full slate of patients.

After he juggles three chainsaws and spins twenty plates balanced on sticks, he moves to the grand finale: ten Bowler hats tossed across the arena and stacked on the ringmaster’s head.

We wrote through the night, between moonlight and morning, admissions and discharges, wrote when phones stopped ringing, when pagers stopped paging. We were raw, opening ourselves to chaos and mystery...

Funny how fast we become prisoners with lost convictions as we fill out the forms, patients getting sicker while they wait.

My doctor-wife squeezes her needle-nose tweezers and lifts the tiny knots high enough to snip with surgical scissors...

Our time was Thursday, 5 o’clock, my psychiatrist’s door always opened wide, him wearing a wool sweater, sipping tea, lights dimmed to an endless twilight...

There was combat in Nam and I let my hair grow long, went to college, studied orgo until I became draft exempt...

County hospital GYN clinic back in the days of Power to the People, five hours for 50 women stirruped by our clinic nurse...

When the soloist lowers her Strad and takes a bow, she reveals the violin’s mark on her throat, which makes me think of Mozart...

Monday, July 1st...Twenty-two new residents...All with perfect teeth...

I was surfing a long board out past the place where you can still smell Coppertone when a ten foot wave smashed me down into darkness...

Med school finals, ten backpack pounds of biochem hauled for months, my epiphany: I would never know more about glucose metabolism than that morning...

Introduce yourself, shake hands, sit down. Always sit down. Then ask for permission...

At three breaths before death a blue latex hand pulls out a trach tube, a blade skims over the zipped up hole, and droplets of blood are sucked into skin...

We teach every intern how to find the place where they can lay down a silver stethoscope and listen to everything...

After your exams, after your diploma, after all the nights on call, missed dinners and diagnoses, after your apologies...

Bolted to the bedroom loft, twenty feet high with lacquered sides and honey colored risers polished with pine-scented wax-these are the rungs I climb to the feather bed, candle, and bottle of red wine...