Here's a book of poetry from an Atlanta physician and writer. I prefer his essays on medicine. But his poetry is also very rewarding. It is often funny and touching, always intelligent.

Epithalamium Begining with the Letter W

W is for wedding
of this woman and this man

Let your twoness be as one
as much as twoness can

though let your one be also two.
And let the letter W stand

for all it came from to:
may you begin as it began,

a double you.

for Betsy and Knox

This short poem reveals Stone's characteristic sense of humor.

I said in an earlier journal entry that I admire Stone's writing on medicine most. It seems to me that the old art of medicine as it was practiced during the Golden Age of Medicine, of the era just past, was his true muse. I like this poem. It has all Stone's strengths: a physcian and scholar's knowledge of the physical and metaphorical heart, a sparkling humor and poetic discipline.


While Watching His Own Echocardiogram, He Welcomes In the New Year

Bell that never bellowed
Hound without a bark
Fetus of my future
dancing in the dark

Nearest blood relation
Valentine alive
Great Somnambulation
toward which all engines strive

And Captain of the ferry
that charges me no fare:
May the New Year let you
win at solitaire.

Dear Tintinnabulation,
as new and wild bells ring,
Old Heart, Mortality,
how sweetly you still sing!

Dr. Stone died recently. He was interested in the connections between art and medicine and often wrote of other poets. A favorite subject was William Carlos Williams, also a physician and a poet. Here's an early poem of Stone's celebrating William Carlos Williams, who practiced as Dr. Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey:

Getting to Sleep in New Jersey

Not twenty miles from where I work,
William Williams wrote after dark,
after the last baby was caught,
knowing that what he really ought

to do was sleep. Rutherford slept,
while all night William Williams kept

scratching at his prescription pad,
dissecting the good lines from the bad.

He tested the general question whether
feet or butt or head-first ever

determines as well the length of labor
of a poem. His work is over:

bones and guts and red wheelbarrows;
the loneliness and all the errors

a heart can make the other end
of a stethoscope. Outside, the wind

corners the house with a long crow.
Silently, his contagious snow

covers the banks of the Passaic River,
where he walked once, full of fever,

tracking his solitary way
back to his office and the white day,

a peculiar kind of bright-eyed bird,
hungry for morning and the perfect word.

A good doctor, like a good writer, is an accomplished listener, Stone maintained. Stone was a much lauded teacher of medicine and of the humanities. Stone's poem Gaudeamus Igitur is often read at medical school graduations, in these lines he expresses his philosophy of medical practice:


For you may need to strain to hear the voice of the patient in the thin reed of his crying

For you will learn to see most acutely out of the corner of your eye to hear best with your inner ear

For there are late signs and early signs

For the patient's story will come to you like hunger, like thirst

From "Gaudeamus Igitur"

-- John Stone, 1982

Finally, another one of Stone's funny poems from this collection.

The Truck

I was coming back from
wherever I'd been when
I saw the truck and
the sign on the back repeated
on the side to be certain
you knew it was no mistake

PROGRESS CASKETS

ARTHUR ILLINOIS

Now folks have different
thoughts it's true about
death but in general it's
not like any race for
example you ever ran
everyone wanting to come in

last and all And I admit
a business has to have a good
name No one knows better
than I the value of a good
name A name is what sells
the product in the first

and in the final place
All this time the Interstate
was leading me into Atlanta
and I was following the sign
and the truck was heavier
climbing the hill than

going down which is as
it should be What I really
wanted to see was the driver
up close maybe talk to him
find out his usual run
so I could keep off it

Not that I'm superstitious It's just
the way I was raised A casket
may be Progress up in Arthur
but it's thought of
down here
as a setback.

I've had this on my bookshelf availables too long. It's time to send this out, hoping that it may be read in bookcrossing. Dr. Stone's poetry deserves attention.

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Released in memory of Dr. Stone, Atlanta physician and poet. Here's his epitaph for a writer from the poem Epitaphs here:

Let the devil play the zither.
Let the angels play their harps.
Given a choice, I'd rather
leave a corpus than a corpse.

This looks really interesting: a poet-physician/physician-poet. The titles alone are wonderful - I just read the "Contents" and am already intrigued.

I finally finished reading this - I try to keep the poetry books in rotation so I don't overdose on any one collection & it takes a while to get through any one book...unless I hate it & give up! Definitely not the case with these poems; I've already been back through to re-read some & plan to book-hog this for while longer. I work in a medical school & there are "Arts-in-Medicine" talks several times throughout the year, plus I think there is an actual informational meeting on campus for the annual William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition...I remember seeing posters up for it last year. I'll release this at some event along those lines.

North campus, Fitz Hall 1st floor lobby

I gave up on the poetry-linked release, and went for the med-student-linked release! The new crop of med students students are starting...I've left this someplace they may see it.