He’s overdressed in killing heat, the sun a screw that’s turned too tight, the air on fire, concrete a punishment. Some thing is done for him, extinguished, turned to ash. Desire looks gone from his worn face, his eyes like holes that sink in sand. Perhaps a junkie, dressed like that. Perhaps another crazy soul, whose home can never square with his address. Perhaps he’s twenty-three or four, an age when life should whistle through his bones. Across the bridge he hurries on, the cage surrounding him belongs to him, alone. And gone, an apparition passing by, the shape a man’s, who has, in some way, died.
Ed Hack was a teacher. Now he’s a poet. He’s been writing for years, published here and there, and, most recently, exploring the precision, passion, and forms of the sonnet. He is the father of the emergency medicine physician and toxicologist, Jason Hack, MD. When Jason asked his father why he would write a poem applicable to the experience of emergency medicine, he said, “I’ve lived it through your eyes and in the stories you have told me for the past twenty years.”