Richard M. Berlin, MD

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...

Sleepless in New Haven, I read this hotel room’s only other book. Power-suited lawyers on the back cover advertise to sue for antidepressant suicides if families will call 1-800-BAD-MEDS...

He wrote that he didn’t know what to say to comfort us, so he decided to describe the view from his rented room near Sydney...

Here we present an excerpt from a screenplay to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.

Half price T-shirts and ice cream cones, no more tomatoes or New York Times, people out patching the roof, putting up storms, the last guests gone tomorrow.

I’m happy to be off the trail, out of the wind and salt spray, safe from the fog’s cold claw...

Dead into a wall of wind, they cliff jump with parabolic wings curled over pilots cradled in goose down and canvas.

I’m glad we’re studying this one, a lusty, almost immortal guy living in his dark tunnels of love.