My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open
and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.
A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld the constitutionality of New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation law restricting drug-company access to some information about doctors’ prescription-writing habits.
The ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston overturns a lower-court decision that said the confidentiality law unconstitutionally infringed on free speech.
Among other things, drug-company sales representatives use the information to target particular doctors and tailor their sales pitches. Patients’ names are not included in the data.