The Long Vacation

"In a minute the doctor will find out what is wrong
And cure me,” the patients think as they wait.
They are as patient as their name, and look childishly
And religiously at the circumstances of their hope,
The nurse, the diploma, the old magazines.

And their childishness is natural; here in this office
The unanswerable perplexities of their existence,
The demands they can neither satisfy nor understand,
Are reduced to the child’s, "I hurt,” the bare
Dilemma of any beast, to go on being.

And they go in to the doctor at last;
And go out to the hospitals, sanatoria, or graves
He prescribes—look into the masked unnoticing
Faces of their saviors, smell the sick
Sweet smell of nothing, leave, send back their checks;

But what was it? What am I?
The convalescent stitched up with black thread,
His pains withering like the state, his uneasy head
Quieted with enemas and orange-juice, the mechanical
Conclusive rudeness of Authority: poor Innocent,

When you go drugged to death—no, ignorantly recover,
Is there anything that has changed for you? Nothing.
You learned nothing, of your life, of your death—
You have been preserved intact for the maze
From which you had found, in your way, the only exit.