Nursing

The midwife kneeled beside me
and when she stroked my thigh

on the toilet seat I noticed the image
of a baby tree, wavering in the deep-

rust stain of the clawfoot tub, splindy
and leafless. I could not pee.

My newborn son was pink, waiting
in the bed to feed and I remembered

the nights my father woke me
and walked me sleepily through

the hall and sat on the tub’s edge until
I peed because I held the fluid all day

and so every night I wet the sheets and we
had no washer and not enough sheets

and then one day it stopped. One night
at seventeen when I was in a hospital

and could not move I lay in wet sheets
listening for the night nurse

who hated me and I hated her
because of the way she flicked

on the lights and whipped
the curtain back, but that night

a nursing student came instead.
She wore a cap like Florence

Nightingale from the book with
the blue pages—her lantern lifted

above dark fields. The nurse’s face
was a dim moon and her eyes

gleamed behind enormous glasses
where I saw my own. She lifted me

gently to the chair and let me lie
against it while she changed the sheets.

I still see her face. I dream of it the way
my girlfriend remembers her dead mother.