James Tilley

James Tilley has published three full-length collections of poetry and a novel with Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, was published as a Ploughshares Solo. His poem, On the Art of Patience, was selected by Billy Collins to win Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry. Four of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His next poetry collection, Ripples in the Fabric of the Universe: New & Selected Poems, will be published in June 2024.

Doctor-Speak

It was as if he were strolling along the water’s edge

on a cloudless day, barely twenty-two, barely aware

of the wavelets licking the sand from his feet

and not even noticing his own breathing. The doctors

would have said that his alveoli were clear as the sky.

Then a storm exploded from some unseen singularity

in the blue, a wrinkle in the fabric of chance,

the cells in the honeycomb of his lungs becoming

so engorged that each contained a whole angry ocean.

The doctors, in their freshly pressed white coats,

can only mumble idiopathic, idiomatic I learn later

for not knowing what to say when they don’t know

what to do, and acute doesn’t describe the situation,

I find out, merely that the condition isn’t chronic.

I could have told them that, if only they had asked.

I hear them speak of eosinophils, a type of white

blood cell, they say, but it sounds to me more like

whitecaps attacking the shoreline of his bronchioles,

my son’s every breath now an act of will, his chest

heaving like a swollen sea. Amidst this outrage,

the doctors tell me that I can only wait for the storm

to abate, and they begin to preach the power

and glory of cortico-steroids. The sad fact is that

I don’t care for their beliefs unless they can

part the sea and let my son walk clear across to land.