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from the issue of April 10, 2008
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American Life in Poetry
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
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.
Poem copyright (c) 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 (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. This column is made possible by the Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org) and supported by the UNL Department of English. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
GO TO: ISSUE OF APRIL 10
ARTS HEADLINES FOR APRIL 10
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'4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' and 'Snow Babies' open April 11 at the Ross
American Life in Poetry
Celaya to make second visit to UNL April 14-18
GALLERY VIEW
Trudell lecture is April 16
'Unvarnished Truth' opens April 17
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