Poetry

I never take calls when I'm with a patient, except today when the phone rings from Boston-liver mets on his scan, biopsy tomorrow...

After all the encores at Tanglewood, the only music left is September’s song of crickets scraping their legs for mates...

The sharp steel wall of the concert hall encloses the melody and wounds the summer sky, a soft yellow glow gathering before moonrise...

Outside, the bluestone patio warmed my bare feet, and I smelled Casablanca lilies and honeysuckle we planted last spring.

Before I knew much psychiatry I met his angry stare in the ER, a homeless man with a three day beard...

We climbed concrete ramps from the subway’s underground world, up to the grandstand and my first vision of heaven...

spring-time territory, raucous and free as a New Orleans . . . trumpet, my patient locked-in to the wild tune

But old colleagues said . . . the holocaust made him an atheist with a poet’s heart, . . . a Jew who loved to stand and chant David’s psalms

I pictured him at his waiting room door . . . clutching a chart, catching eyes, . . . calling out a name, bewildered

Here's to the lovely trees of Jersey, my home . . . town streets lined with linden and larch, . . . poplar and elm, flowered locusts scenting

I place a stethoscope in my ears and listen to the heart when I’ve run out of things to say.

I'm reviewing a left ventriculography from a man with chest pain, MI ruled out, his wife dead for a post-crash hour...

"A hundred people dancing so hard they’ve thrown off their shoes . . ."

Einstein's happiest moment revealed.

-for SusanneWe kneeled on the bookstore floortwo students scanning the bodiesof new books, checking outeach other's Principlesof Internal Medicine.Scores of textbooks laterwe're a pair of pagers and missed dinners,companions in sleep-deprived nights.We suffered the long delaybefore our only child while we ranto slashed wrists and ODs,sprinted from half-read journalto school play to board meeting.In conversation long as summer lightwe talked patients and drugs,recited the simple prayers of dying,learned how we both took medicineas a life-long lover.One hushed June evening in mid-lifescented rose and thick with fire-flies,the phone steals her.I sit with my half-filled glass

Needle sticks and night call, Hep B burrowing skin, bad smells, deep wounds, death, dying, dead wood...

A poetry reading by psychiatrist Richard Berlin, MD.

One of the special aspects of practicing in a small community is seeing patients living their lives outside the office.

Two yellow feathers and a skull. . . drop from the sky and fall on the brown . . . scar of trail, a sharp-shinned hawk

Each wound speaks its own language.

A poetry reading by psychiatrist Richard Berlin, MD.

As a consultation liaison psychiatrist, one of his assignments was to work on a renal dialysis unit to determine whether or not a patient was competent to opt out of treatment.

His pager calls. Code Blue. And for no reason at all, he lifts the window and blows a little life back into the world.

We lower a plastic tray on his ribs, as if food can stop the dying: cold potato scooped like a snowball, canned spinach. More in this reading by Richard Berlin, MD.