Nymphets sporting at a mountain stream.
"I'm getting a gift today"
I told the nurse from my
hospital bed.
"How nice" she responded.
"What is it?"
"Oh" I replied, "it's a surprise.
"I won't know until I get it."
She said "How nice" again
and then gave me an
enema.
Actually, I wasn't expecting anything
from anybody during my hospital stay.
I wasn't dying, so nobody but my
brother Casey had come to visit.
He brought me a sports magazine --
he knows very well I loathe sports.
I told him, too crossly, to come back
with something worthwhile to read,
and he left suddenly, silently,
and sullenly.
I didn't expect him back.
I don't know why I told the nurse
I was getting a gift -- it just
popped out spontaneously,
like a bit of chewed food flung
from my mouth during an animated
dinner conversation.
I do it all the time --
once I told a friend that I was
being published in the New Yorker.
He was duly impressed,
so I had to drop him completely
to keep from ever answering his
embarrassing questions about when it would
be published.
In grade school I told all
my teachers that I was extremely
allergic to jute twine --
so I was excused from the annual
paper drive, and any time
I caught sight of a piece of twine
at school I began to sneeze like
crazy.
But that same day Casey
surprised me by coming back with
a book for me.
"Well, thanks!" I told him.
"S'all right -- hope it's deep enough
for you" he said, then patted me on
the shoulder and left.
It was a copy of Lolita.
The nurse saw it when she came in.
"Dirty old man" I could hear her thinking.
My oncologist saw it that evening on his
rounds.
"Read that in college" he told me.
"It wasn't as dirty as everyone said."
When he left I threw the book into
the wastebasket.
And read the damn sports magazine.
