reflection on work as an orderly

i worked for about five years
wheeling ill and broken people
to a room
with a curtain for a door
where they would be prepared for surgery

i was young enough to think it drugery
to look down at them as they rolled
on their stretchers
with plastic mattresses and pillows starched
so as to make it a simple matter
to make each stretcher impersonal when
these bodies had passed
elsewhere

tough guys
veterans, or sons
who were grateful you were taking
their father, grateful that something
would be happening soon
to change things, to relieve the tension
of an hour or two cloistered in a room where
there were no simple words left, where
the absence of an adequate supply of small talk
was etched across their backs as they bent
over someone who had been anything to them
but a hospitalized patient
for all the years
until that moment

young enough
to think it a drudgery
to stand with co-workers on smoke breaks
and see the numb relief of smoke-filled lungs
the life that haloed them in rings of
simple exhalations

i was young enough
to think that real life was in another place
than the room where someone clung
to what kindness a nurse could spare for one
of a list of persons on an endless round
of working hours

now i work
at a private college
where youngsters with suburban confidence
hunt down real life in the smoke
of ideas of getting rich, of realizing idealized dreams
where experience like microbes seeks
to penetrate the armor of activities
or to infect for a moment the bustle of
perfect abstract truths
that halo every classroom

and deep at night sometimes for a moment
i stand alone among the sleeping neighbors
and i think of all the things that we prepare