Lance Newman The Good Doctor Portly in pressed summer
linens, he surveyed the mottled
skins of passing patients,
counting umbrellas and visors.He recalled their complaints
and nodded like a cardinal
from the long gallery
of his heart pine steamboat mansion.No. I’m too cruel. Truth is,
he only wanted best—for me,
for his son who always cried
when we practiced a new duet.Best was Bowdoin, med school,
a mantel clock that’s marked decades,
a brown betty teapot,
Gray’s Anatomy bound in calf.“This is the shuttlecock,”
he taught us, “these, the battledores.”
In the shade of a, yes,
magnolia grandiflora,legs crossed on an Adirondack
chair like an ethical
cake in a baker’s bay window,
he’d watch and laugh, “Good shot!”