Why I like Hospitals

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Because it is all right to be in a bad mood there,
slouching along through the underground garage,
riding wordlessly on the elevator with the other customers,
staring at the closed beige doors like a prison wall.

I like the hospital for the way it grants permission for pathos—
the mother with cancer deciding how to tell her kids,
the bald girl gazing downward at the shunt
installed above her missing breast,

the crone in her pajamas, walking with an IV pole.
I don’t like the smell of antiseptic,
or the air-conditioning set on high all night,
or the fresh flowers tossed into the wastebasket,

but I like the way some people on their plastic chairs
break out a notebook and invent a complex scoring system
to tally up their days on earth,
the column on the left that says, Times I Acted Like a Fool,
facing the column on the right that says, Times I Acted Like a Saint.

I like the long prairie of the waiting;
the forced intimacy of the self with the self;
each sick person standing in the middle of a field,
like a tree wondering what happened to the forest.

And once I saw a man in a lime-green dressing gown,
hunched over in a chair; a man who was not
yelling at the doctors, or pretending to be strong,
or making a murmured phone call to his wife,

but one sobbing without shame,
pumping it all out from the bottom of the self,
the overflowing bilge of helplessness and rage,
a man no longer expecting to be saved,

but if you looked, you could see
that he was holding his own hand in sympathy,
listening to every single word,
and he was telling himself everything.

“Why I Like the Hospital” from Turn Up the Ocean.
Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Tony Hoagland.

Tony Hoagland was the author of seven collections of poetry, including Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. He was also the author of two collections of essays, Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays and Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft. He received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He taught for many years at the University of Houston. Hoagland died in October 2018.

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