The Enemy

Rafael Campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Landscape with Human Figure, winner of the gold medal in poetry from ForeWord Magazine; Diva, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize; and What the Body Told, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for Poetry; all also published by Duke University Press. He has written two books of essays, The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry and The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor’s Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire, winner of a Lambda Literary Award for memoir. His poetry and essays have appeared in periodicals including The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The New Republic, Out, The Paris Review, and The Washington Post Book World.

Acknowledgments xi

I. The Enemy

Dialogue with Sun and Poet 3

Addressed to Her (Provincetown, June 2002) 4

"Elsa, Varadero, 1934" 5

Night Has Fallen 6

Personal Mythology 7

Piranhas 8

Brief Treatise on the New Millennial Poetics 10

El Viejo y la Mar 12

Ode to the Man Incidentally Caught in the Photograph of Us on My Desk 13

The Enemy 14

God, Gays, and Guns 15

Patriotic Poem 17

Post-9/11 Parable 18

Sestina Dolorosa 19

What Passes Now for Moral Discourse 21

from Libro de Preguntas 22

II. Eighteen Days in France

Eighteen Days in France 27

III. Toward a Theory of Memory

from Cien Sonetos de Amor 47

A Simple Cuban Meal 51

The Sailfish 52

Ganymede, to Zeus 53

After the Long Drive
55

For Jorge, after Twenty Years 57

Song in the Off-Season 60

Catastrophic Sestina 61

Toward a Theory of Memory 63

Patagonia 67

Defense of Marriage 68

The Story of Us 69

The Sodomite's Lament 71

Equinoctial Downpour 72

Pantoum for Our Imagined Break-Up 73

The Changing of the Seasons 74

Once, It Seemed Better 75

October, Last Sail 76

IV. Dawn, New Age

Dawn, New Age 79

Allegorical 80

Progress 81

The Crocuses 82

Crybaby Haiku 83

"Silence=Death" 87

Clinical Vignettes 88

You Bring Out the Doctor in Me 90

Composite of Three Poems from the Same Anthology by Williams, Rukeyser, and Sexton 92

Tuesday Morning 93

Arriving 95

Absolution 97

On Doctoring 98

Sick Day 99