Emerald
CityI was admiring,
the beautiful city space where you tend to your medicine. The ivory towers,
I circled round and round the other day. It was a cold and perfect fall
morning, early enough for the sky to be an intense ammonia blue, windy
enough to be blowing up white swabs of soothing clouds, and the sun was slanted
enough, to be turning the towering stack on the corner of Francis St. and
Brookline Ave., into gold. I walked the blocks in concentric circles,
trying to see which buildings might offer a view of the giant rooftop washtubs,
dropping great umbrellas of steam over doctors, nurses, patients hurrying
bundled by. How do I get in to see Oz? I walked up by the marbled and
pillared Harvard research buildings, nearly as dusty and quiet outside
as Greek ruins, hugging the earth like white turtles. I wandered back
behind the giant gray corncobs of Brigham and Women's Hospital, wondered
at curtains askew, like missing teeth. Cameraless, passportless, without
rope or crampons, I couldn't get to the heights, I couldn't reach the
canopy of the medical forest. I walked out from the dark forest floor
to get warmed up in the sunshine pouring into Longwood Avenue. -
Holly W. Graves, 2002
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