Hospital

By Marianne Boruch b. 1950 Marianne Boruch

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 ©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.

Biography

Poet and essayist Marianne Boruch grew up in Chicago. She is the author of seven collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Book of Hours (2011); Grace, Fallen from (2008); and Poems: New & Selected (2004). Her memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (2011), concerns a hitchhiking trip she took in 1971. In the Blue Pharmacy (2005) and Poetry’s Old Air (1995) are collections of her prose on poetry. In an interview with Brooke . . .

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