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Column 155

Hospital

Intro by Ted Kooser
03.19.2008

The Amer­i­can poet Eliz­a­beth Bish­op often wrote of how places — both famil­iar and for­eign — looked, how they seemed. Here Mar­i­anne Boruch of Indi­ana begins her poem in this way, too, in a space famil­iar to us all but made new — made strange — by close observation. 

Hospital

It seems so—         
I don’t know.  It seems   
as if the end of the world   
has never happened in here.   
No smoke, no   
dizzy flaring except   
those candles you can light   
in the chapel for a quarter.   
They last maybe an hour   
before burning out.   
                            And in this room   
where we wait, I see   
them pass, the surgical folk—     
nurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up   
the blood drop—ready for lunch,   
their scrubs still starched into wrinkles,   
a cheerful green or pale blue,   
and the end of a joke, something   
about a man who thought he could be—   
what?  I lose it   
in their brief laughter.

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We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2006 by Marianne Boruch, whose most recent book of poetry is Grace, Fallen from, Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Poem reprinted from “TriQuarterly,” Issue 126, by permission of Marianne Boruch. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.