Limit Falls

A poem about a visit to the ER, plus a new project for the New Year

My mom, long before she fell

Happy New Year! It’s good to be back here. A few weeks ago I mentioned a new idea I had for generating poetry prompts, The Public Domain Poetry Project. It’s just about ready to launch and I can’t wait to tell you about it. But first, today’s poem:

Sometimes it’s hard to know where a poem is going at the start. Short, long, somewhere in the middle. I’ll think I’m starting something weighty, lengthy, only to have it wrap up much sooner than I thought it would. Or I’m trying to write something brief, thinking all along that the next stanza will be the last, but it just keeps going.

The poem below is the second kind. In retrospect, I can see that it was always going to be long. It’s my memory of one of the many visits I made to the ER with my mother after one of her falls. Those visits were always long, and they were quite frequent. I got so I kept a “go bag” ready with snacks, masks, hand sanitizer, a bottle of water, an extra layer, a book. It became routine in some ways.

Things stand out from those visits, good and bad. People in the waiting room, a particularly kind nurse, the very tall doctor who tended my mom on a night so busy we never did get a cubicle, just a spot in the hallway. I wrote down the barebones of this poem below several years ago and unearthed it recently from an old notebook. It felt like it was writing itself in a way, tugging me back from tangents. One stanza that I was very attached to and kept trying to find a place for simply disappeared at one point. Sometimes the poet calls the shots, sometimes the poem is the boss.

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Limit Falls

She falls like falling is her job,
like there is a purpose to it
other than another visit to the ER

Why are we here? she asks
for maybe the tenth time
since we arrived

You had a fall, I say
Yeah, she says, And…
You fell five times in one day

Her eyebrows jump, her lower lip 
juts out, communicating
surprise and a grudging respect

As though the self she can no longer 
remember being has managed 
something pretty impressive

She has a black eye and soft, 
carefully applied bandages on her arms, 
and the back of her neck where her spine curves in

We are sitting in a hallway
No room at the inn, she says
as a doctor hurries past

His white coat billows behind
and he walks like all the gangly,
overgrown boys I’ve known

Leaning forward onto his toes,
long arms jutting at the elbow,
his chin leading the rest of him along

When he comes to sit with us
in a tiny borrowed chair with wheels,
his knees are bent above his hips

And I imagine he has a become
a portable version of himself,
able to be collapsed and tucked away

My attention has wandered,
seeing him folded inward,
like a music stand, like an umbrella

But I needn’t have worried
because he is saying the thing
they all say, every visit, every time

In the elderly, every fall is a concussion
whether or not they hit their head
because their brains have shrunk	

So a fall causes the brain to slosh around
They all say slosh and make the same motion 
with their hands, like shaking a Magic 8 Ball

I glance at my tiny, crescent-shaped mother 
wearing her smile-for-the-doctor face
and back again at his slender hands 

still demonstrating the slosh
like a fishbowl full of water
like a tureen of slopping soup

I ask what we should do,
knowing the answer because, 
like the slosh, it’s always the same

Limit falls, he says, as though we could
with a few simple changes,
as though we haven’t tried

I thank him as though 
he has been helpful,
because he means to be helpful

He unfolds himself from the chair, 
takes my mother’s tiny hand
in his long-fingered ones,  

Patting her bruised knuckles, 
and then he is gone, white coat 
flying like a cape behind him

She is dozing as I sign the papers,
wakes as I wheel her to the car,
sleeps again as I drive her home

In the car between us are 
her discharge papers stapled
to the packet on fall prevention,

The one the nurse insisted I take,
even when I told her she already 
had several copies at home

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The Public Domain Poetry Project

Announcing The Public Domain Poetry Project! Starting this Wednesday, I’ll be posting a line from a poem in the public domain each week for you to use as a poetry prompt. You can share your poem in the comments if you like. We’ll make our way through the whole poem, line by line, week by week. Those are the basics. If you’re interested, click over the my introduction to read more and subscribe for free!

Thanks for reading, everyone!