for Jana

In wards where life comes screaming
into being, where searing muscles
infants into separateness

and the unaccustomed light,
there are now monitors that show
both the drama at hand

and, in a second, smaller pane,
the stats of someone’s striving
in another room. My friend says

it’s a safety measure, the means
for nurses to watch a second pulse
for the Morse of distress.

And a convenience: OBs consult
the elevation maps of contractions;
they time their arrivals to the infants’.

But women in labor can also see
the screen, the crescendo building
in another mother’s body,

the up-tempo heartbeat of a small
argonaut. It is a minor thing
and a major thing, my friend says,

to know that for someone
down the hall, it’s the same:
the extremes of ardor and torture.

When my son was new
and had his days and nights
confused, sometimes I stood

by a window of our house, hoping
a car would drive down
our sleepy street. I didn’t want

to be the only one in the vast
unanswering hours. I’m always
just around the corner,

my friend writes. We are both
striving in the ward
of a vast, unanswering year.