Oxygen

 

Hospital in May

Oxygen, we take for granted. Most of us don’t think about oxygen from one moment to the next. There it goes, feeding our thoughts every minute of the day, yet we don’t give it a second thought. Nurses think about oxygen regularly. In a flash they look up to check that the flow is going, the level is right, the air is breathing. They think about oxygen the way we think about time. By which I mean, what time is it now? We are likely to treat an oxygen tank as absurdist, at first. Isn’t the whole world an oxygen tank? The large letters of the word go the length of the tank in capital letters, but this is no cartoon, rather the air we intake, as the creatures will tell you and the trees are free to remind us, any old time. Once upon a time I went through a phase of reading a Canadian poet whose most famous poem is about beach glass. Another captivating poem of hers was a landscape with vast atmospheric sky. In order to affect airiness, all the words of her long poem were double-spaced apart both by line and sentence sequence. Punctuation was more or less dispensed with, freeing further the airy poetry, immensely enough oxygen to go around. Technically speaking this was a concrete poem, even though it celebrates the very opposite of concrete. Shape poem is a more helpful term, the spaces between the words illustrating with a naïve quick trick of illusion how oxygen runs the world. Charming as this landscape in words may be, the message is immediate. More difficult is to follow the same rules to write effectively about the airiness of a hospital ward. A comprehensive list of medical furniture, drug names, drips and drains, cannulas and monitors, spaced across several pages, may never get us to think about oxygen, or be thankful, even though life depends on it from a depending tube. The ward corridors of this hospital are well-spaced with paintings by the Heidelberg School. I tread carefully towards them on my frame as I do a lap of the ward. Each artist is fixed upon the colours of the Yarra floodplain in this part of town, the marvellous shapes of tree and mountain, and each has their own way of getting those factors right. Each is distinctively their own landscapist. And each is wanting to render atmosphere, that invisible source of life no matter how many clouds we gaze at, at the time. By which they mean, what time is it now? I spend some time deep-breathing, deep-breath-hold-breathe-away-cough, as I enjoy their oxygen of immense airiness, the way clouds are moving just so no rush, the way she-oaks are lungs alive along a crest of Eaglemont, the way magpies are flying between the trees in colours reminiscent of an absurdist oxygen tank, with wild warblings that are straight magpie.