Doctors, said the professor
to the room of fresh pre-meds,
know this:
Eighty percent of the people
you treat will get better
even if you do nothing.
Ten percent will heal because
of what you do. And ten percent
will get worse because of what you do.
Let’s begin.
Tonight, as my daughter’s skin
blooms increasingly red—
a rash staining her trunk,
her face, her limbs—I consider
what the professor said.
She is long past the age
where I can heal things
with a kiss. Still, I kiss her,
knowing this to be the best medicine
eighty percent of the time.
I give her a dose of jokes,
and prescribe another chapter
of The Silver Chair. We read
as the red grows angrier.
She laughs when I tell her
at least she didn’t break her arm
or lose all of her hair.
I hate how helpless I feel.
Though I did not enter
the rooms of dissection
nor memorize tomes
of bones and diseases and cures,
I still have the longing
to heal, to remove the pain, to nurse.
If she is afraid, she does not show it.
I disguise my fear. I give her
another kiss. It won’t, at least,
make anything worse.
*with thanks to Dr. John Belka for the story that opens this poem.