All night the ambulances screamed in
with the dead or dying.
It was easy to see the hospital as a station
for the departures.
We were always half awake.
It rained often. Afternoons
at a window, I imagined the edges of things---
glass dividing warm air from cold,
the millions of raindrops,
their separate splashes in the yard.
Once a siren’s red slash invited
a wound where the air opened up
over a line of stalled cars.
Something huge and dark dissolved,
like rain beginning to fall.
I read about the way the edges of fractures
just touch and knit quietly
in the darkness of the leg or ribcage.