or a fly, any similar insect
that cannot detach himself from a book:
for as much, he calls the doctor.
The doctor arrives with lenses
looking like a literary critic
in aid of the patient
who moans from the web of glass.
He reads the symptoms: he listens
carefully to poems, bottling the patient
in each reading
with intelligent phrases.
He bottles some faeces into jars
with microscopes astonished
by obsolescence, with tarnished
gestures of orderlies.
The Pedro II Hospital
has tarnished its orderlies who,
from so much polishing of the ill,
absorb their gaze of drowsiness.
The student polishes
cadavers, rubbing them
until the lucid glass of the dead
shines, having been re-read.
