In the hospital emergency department
I overhear a social worker talking to a young
woman in a recliner getting heart meds but
has no place to sleep tonight.

“Do you want two days at the Salvation Army
and then apply for permanent placement?”
he asks.

She hesitates.

“Do you have anywhere you can be safe?”

Her rapid-fire response ricochets down the hall.
“I can’t go to my mother. She using, and I…”

The social worker listens. “I understand,” he says.

And this is after another woman in the recliner
next to me has arrived with a six-day headache,
whose usual medications have not worked,
sits tethered to an IV cocktail drip, only in
slightly less pain when her husband arrives
to take her home.

And after five days of lower gut pain and fever,
I have slid through the doughnut of a CT scanner
with my name emblazoned on top like a theater
marquee to take pictures of my infected colon,

which three weeks ago, at this very hospital,
was scoped out while I, deep in twilight sleep,
had one of the best meditations of my life,
floating through nirvana, not wanting to return.

And as I, too, receive my own IV cocktail,
I hear the social worker tell the hesitant young
woman, “I know it’s a Band Aid, far from ideal,
but we don’t want you sleeping on the street.”

And I think of my warm bed waiting in a house
that I own, a big black and white kitty waiting,
too, and, as I so often do, give thanks for my
lucky, lovely life—as well as antibiotics for
a momentarily unhappy colon—grateful that,
in more ways than one, this, too, shall pass.