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.
