The Map She Drew in Fever (Florence Nightingale)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were rich
and pretty
and your mother
wanted you
to marry
a suitable man
in a suitable house
and the suitable house
had the thick
floral-camphor smell
of a future
that had been
upholstered
for you
before
you arrived
and you
set fire
to the upholstery
by becoming
a nurse
which in
eighteen fifty
was the same thing
as becoming
unpresentable
on purpose.

[Verse 2]
The soldiers
in Scutari
were dying
of the hospital
faster
than they were dying
of the war
and the dying-of-the-hospital
had the sour
carbolic taste
of a fact
no one
in the chain
of command
had bothered
to measure
because measuring
the fact
would have
required
admitting
that the chain
of command
was the infection.

[Chorus]
So you
measured it.
You invented
a diagram —
a polar area chart —
because
the generals
could not
read a table
of numbers
but the generals
could read
a wedge of color
and the wedge
that meant
*died of the hospital*
was so much larger
than the wedge
that meant
*died of the enemy*
that the diagram
made the argument
the way
a scalpel
makes an incision —
one clean line
through the part
that is pretending
not to be
the problem.

[Verse 3]
The basal ganglia
of a general
who has been
shown a diagram
of his own
incompetence
in a color
he cannot
argue with
will do
one of two things:
change the hospital
or shoot
the nurse.
They changed
the hospital.

[Outro]
You spent
the last
fifty years
of your life
in a bed
with the fever
you caught
in Scutari
and the bed
was not
an end.
The bed
was a desk
and the desk
produced
eight hundred
published pages
of public health
reform
and the fever
never left
and the pages
never stopped
and the wedge
of color
that meant
*died of
the hospital*
got smaller
every year
for the rest
of the century
because
the nurse
with the diagram
had made
the argument
one clean line
at a time
from a bed
she could not
get out of.

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