A Portrait of the Poet as a Young Pediatrician

Vincent Hostak

July 6, 2025

for William Carlos Williams

You could live a second lifetime 

in the Meadowlands

filling your lungs with damp air,

marveling at a glowing bog-bean flower

loitering under the towering reeds 

But, only as long as you were unbothered

by the busy details around you:

clouds of gnats, odors rising 

from the slow hot simmer of fallen leaves

or the uninvited, open-throated howl

of mowers along the turnpike.

A young doctor

has little time to lose himself in the marsh,

to map the entirety of the small countries

toiling in dust shed by cattails.

Instead, he sees minute hospitals in the shoals

where no birth is accidental 

and how a nightcrawlers’ severed parts  

might be reunited by tiny surgeons

He sees a bee’s wing in need of repair

His large, soft hands, he knows,

would be far too clumsy for the task.

Hears the crackling call of an ibis

recalling the pediatric ward’s cranky intercom 

which dropped consonants from his name

Witnessing spoonbills stiffly roosting

with their beaks, those long forceps

sweeping the shallows, pinching out minnows.

Everywhere in this soup something is hard at work,

an exotic world is close at hand

Everywhere, a detail to be remembered

even after the stroke

When the walks grew few to none,

Flossie read to him for hours

When he struggled to speak,

his tongue drummed words against his teeth

A lotus stranded in a drying pool, still blooms

A cloak of tadpoles quivering on a frog’s back

soon cling to parrot-feathered weeds

waiting until the world needs their voices.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes and produces the podcast: Crossings: the Refugee Experience in America.