“Where can we live but days”

“Where can we live but days?” is the closing question of a poem Elfrieda Von Riesen recites in her hospital room after a pastor from her parents’ former East Village Mennonite church has urged her to turn to God. The poem makes days the place where life is lived, but its second verse brings the priest and doctor into view; in the hospital, those figures are not remote abstractions. They echo the religious visitor who has just tried to explain Elfrieda’s pain and desire to live. The poem’s meaning remains open, while the scene gives its questions immediate stakes.

The poem in the hospital room

The recitation takes place during a secret lunch in Elfrieda’s room. Lottie sits calmly, while Yolandi paces as she eats; Elfrieda manages perhaps three tiny bites of her sandwich, watching Yolandi with a furrowed brow and hair described as a wild nest. Their meal is interrupted in memory by the pastor’s visit. He had come while Lottie and Yolandi were away and had persuaded his way past the nurses’ desk to see Elfrieda. He told her that if she gave her life to God, she would have no pain and would want to live. He also cast her refusal as an egregious sin and asked to pray for her soul.

Yolandi reacts with profanity and shock when she hears what happened. Lottie identifies Elfrieda as furious and looks directly at her, hoping she will display the anger and verbal force for which she is known. Instead of simply recounting an argument, the sisters return to a poem: Lottie urges Elfrieda to say it, and Elfrieda begins with the question, “What are days for?” The quiet prompt gives the poem a place inside the family’s conversation, after an outsider has tried to define what Elfrieda’s pain and future should mean.

Days as an answer

The poem answers its own opening question in plain language: “Days are where we live.” Its next lines insist that this answer holds across time, ending in the repeated, distilled question “Where can we live but days?” The movement is from asking what days are for to naming them as the unavoidable ground of living. In this scene, that answer does not promise happiness, recovery, or a resolution to Elfrieda’s suffering. It locates life in the days themselves, without claiming that those days are easy.

Yolandi initially misses that Elfrieda is reciting a poem. She responds to the opening question by asking what Elfrieda means, and later says she likes the answer. Lottie corrects her and insists there is a second verse, directing the room’s attention back to Elfrieda’s words. The exchange distinguishes hearing a memorable line from listening to the poem as a whole: the first verse offers its compact account of where life takes place, while the next complicates it with the arrival of religious and medical authority.

The priest, the doctor, and the interruption

In the second verse, the solution to the question brings “the priest and the doctor” running over the fields in their long coats. The image places spiritual and medical figures together, and the hospital setting makes that pairing especially pointed. The pastor has come into a medical institution to speak about pain, salvation, sin, and the will to live. The poem does not explain what Elfrieda thinks of the figures or settle the conflict between religious judgment and her experience; instead, it lets their appearance carry the tension into the recitation.

When Yolandi asks what the pastor said in response, Elfrieda answers that he said nothing. At Lottie’s urging, she explains why: “Because by the end of it I had taken off all my clothes.” Lottie adds that he left quickly. The account abruptly replaces the expected exchange of arguments or prayer with a bodily action and the visitor’s departure. The scene does not state Elfrieda’s motive, so the act need not be reduced to a single symbolic meaning. Its consequence is clear, however: the pastor’s effort to secure a verbal or spiritual answer ends without one, and his visit does not conclude in prayer.

Meaning and narrative function

The phrase “Where can we live but days?” holds together the poem’s reflection and the particular room in which it is spoken. It does not erase the religious visitor’s condemnation or the fact that Elfrieda is in hospital; nor does it offer a cure for pain. Instead, the poem’s insistence on days makes ordinary time the measure of life, while its second verse summons the figures who might claim authority over how that life is understood. The contrast gives the words weight without turning them into a simple declaration of hope.

The scene also moves through sharply different registers: a meager shared lunch, a pastor’s severe pronouncement, the careful prompting of a poem, and an ending that leaves the visitor speechless. Lottie’s insistence that Yolandi listen to the second verse shapes the scene’s attention: the poem cannot be reduced to its most consoling line. Its priest and doctor, and the story of the pastor’s silence, remain part of what the days contain. The closing question therefore works less as a solution than as a frame for living amid unresolved pain, family concern, religious judgment, and medical care.