Untitled Document
inmemorium poem #1
(Terri Jackson was an
SSU graduate and then
on the
UIS staff till her
recent death at 50, of
cancer. She was
universally beloved.)
be there heaven
be there gold
then
terri’s there
within the fold
© Jacqueline Jackson 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.
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). American Life in Poetry is made
possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also
supported by the Department of English at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln.
Ted Kooser served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from
2004-2006. For more information, go to www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2008.
