In the beginning language imagined a history without roots, then cut back to discussing feelings
as cascading forms. This detail is like a youth examining the blue-veined style of words.

In the waiting room, an old woman with shriveled-up blue-veined skin sits in a wheelchair; ahead of her, in the examining room, a doctor is telling me he's unable to diagnose the cluster of red spots meandering up my right kneecap, as they would be encountered unexpectedly, just past a bend, under a   

In the waiting room: "Today, now, the doctor is here. What a good feeling to be in the clinic, in this place of miracles. In the hall I see the doctors and nurses working. So clean, so healthy. See what miracles have done for them." L.J. Schneiderman, "The Appointment." In R. Reynolds and J. Stone, On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays. New York, 1991.

an old woman: "She represented the kind of death that our culture wished to conceal, making it invisible as old women are made invisible: the common garden-