To Serve

To live is to serve, my mother’s motto, to blow on the burn,
salve the wound, wind miles of gauze bandages, to pull the fork
from the hand jammed to the growing bone by a father’s blunt fist,
the nice gone from her eyes when she met him in the hall.
She had opinions she never kept to herself, bruised broken
patients she advised to leave, opening her own door
if no other was offered, harsh words for the boy who climbed
the church yard fence even as they excised the steel picket from his thigh.
She was a nurse first and last, from the moment she woke
to her coma drop onto the bed, too tired to plump the pillow
or tunnel beneath the comforter, her uniform still blood-spattered,
her cap hanging by the tines of a bobby pin caught
in a few loose hairs, her hands cupped at her breasts, as if
she were still cradling the dead baby’s bald, misshapen head.

Author of the article

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men, is currently available from W.W. Norton. Her fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, and Smoke, as well as two fine small press editions, Superman: The Chapbook and Dark Charms, both from Red Dragonfly Press. Co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, she’s the recipient of two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net. In 2001, she was invited by late poet laureate Stanley Kunitz to read at the Library of Congress.