Visit to Hospices de Beaune, Middle Ages almshouse 
    	and hospital for the poor in Burgundy, France.

At first, I cannot tell what harm it does:
hand drill with wooden brace, metal shaft
sharpened to a bud. Nuns once sang hymns

to ease the stench of bloodied bedsheets,
latrines funneling offal into the underworld.
Farther along lie the apothecary and kitchens.

Vines blanket Burgundy hillsides, sponging
the soil’s lime. The hospital roof blazes heaven-yellow,
but of all signs of compassion, it is the drill

that moves me most, and I picture the patient
gritting teeth as corkscrew thread bites down
on bone, delivers a dose of daylight to the brain:

a manhole to relieve madness. I remember—
fifteen—stumbling upon a photo in National Geographic:
ancient skull punctured with a hole like a wishing well.

How in those days I cradled my head and wept.
With what despair I bored fingers into temples,
asking the sacred matter inside, What’s the matter?