Dave Bonta's "Medicine" is built like a ward with the curtains half drawn: you catch one scene, then another, and have to work out how they connect. The poem alternates between two kinds of writing. The longer blocks are prose, flat and reported, close to overheard gossip. Between them sit short lined stanzas of spring woodland, where the language slows into images. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The contrast between the two modes is the poem's main structure.
The prose sections trace a family's habits of control. The LPN, a licensed practical nurse, believes in being firm. She stares down her five-year-old until the child looks away, and she once sat on her infant son so he would learn "to lie still." Her motto, "Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile," sounds like common sense, and bleakly, that is what makes it disturbing. Yet the second stanza shows her, presumably the same woman, creeping in "on stockinged feet" to a patient who moans "Help me, help me, / somebody, nurse." At work her softness is a professional skill, while at home the same attention hardens into discipline. The title makes us ask which of these counts as medicine.
The 88-year-old great-grandmother complicates things. She is the poem's most sympathetic figure, and she is treated like a child herself: "They all talk to me like a child." Her gratitude for an "adult conversation" with the speaker and companion (the poem says "she tells us") is quietly painful. The family's pattern of managing the helpless runs through every generation, from baby to old woman. Even she cannot escape it. She argues that love "need not be accompanied by threats or a smothering embrace," then, when the four-year-old kicks her, "she hits back." Bonta lets the phrase "much to his outraged surprise" hold a small, dry joke, but the joke also admits that her principles have limits. Exhaustion, not cruelty, seems to drive this household, and the poem hints at it when the great-grandmother says she can't remember her last good night's sleep. That sentence echoes the patient who moans "all night" and the nurse who must keep rising to her.
The nature stanzas never comment on the people, yet they answer them. "Smothering" returns in the second of them, where blossoms that look like clouds turn out to be "some wild cherry wrapped in caterpillar webs": beauty with something wrapped around it. The moss "cracks open from lack of rain," a small image of dryness and need. The trilliums are a "white mirage," a lovely thing that may not be reliable. The most affecting image is the abandoned farm's lawn chair, where petals "drift down between the slats." Nobody sits there, nobody commands anyone, and the only touch is gentle and unforced.
The final stanza is the poem's answer. "Toothwort, / spleenwort, / bleeding-heart, / hepatica" is a chant of plant names, and several of them point to the body: tooth, spleen, heart, and "hepatica," which echoes the word hepatic, meaning of the liver. The woods contain a whole pharmacy, so the title gets its second meaning. Real medicine in this poem is not the nurse's firmness but the unglamorous underground "net of roots" that stops us from falling "forever." A net catches without crushing, and that is the opposite of the sitting-on and staring-down seen earlier.
The poem is significant because it declines to preach. It never calls the LPN a villain or the great-grandmother a saint, and it lets their words and actions stand side by side. What lingers is a question about how people learn to care: by tightening their grip, or by being held themselves. The poem's final image suggests that support must exist before tenderness can, and that people who are always on the edge of falling find it hard to be gentle with each other.