{"id":218,"date":"2008-03-14T07:22:06","date_gmt":"2008-03-14T11:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.berkshirelinks.com\/berkshires-news\/poetry\/hospital-by-marianne-boruch-american-life-in-poetry\/"},"modified":"2008-03-14T07:22:06","modified_gmt":"2008-03-14T11:22:06","slug":"hospital-by-marianne-boruch-american-life-in-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idealpoetry.com\/rwc\/hospital-by-marianne-boruch-american-life-in-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Hospital, by Marianne Boruch – American Life in Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

American Life in Poetry: Column 155<\/strong><\/p>\n

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006<\/p>\n

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

Hospital<\/strong><\/p>\n

It seems so–
\nI don’t know. It seems
\nas if the end of the world
\nhas never happened in here.
\nNo smoke, no
\ndizzy flaring except
\nthose candles you can light
\nin the chapel for a quarter.
\nThey last maybe an hour
\nbefore burning out.
\n             And in this room
\nwhere we wait, I see
\nthem pass, the surgical folk–
\nnurses, doctors, the guy who hangs up
\nthe blood drop–ready for lunch,
\ntheir scrubs still starched into wrinkles,
\na cheerful green or pale blue,
\nand the end of a joke, something
\nabout a man who thought he could be–
\nwhat? I lose it
\nin their brief laughter.<\/p>\n

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org<\/a>), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 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. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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