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Edward Kienholz The State Hospital
作者Author  /  Paul  Muldoon  保羅.穆耳頓
Edward Kienholz The State Hospital
Paul Muldoon


Edward Kienholz The State Hospital
 

Where a naked man, asleep, is strapped
to the lower bunk of a bed.
The bed-pan is so tantalizingly out of reach
we may assume he has trouble
with his bowels.
He will have been beaten by an orderly,
a bar of soap wrapped
in a towel.

His head, when we come to examine the head
we would never allow ourselves to touch,
is a fish bowl
in which two black fish, or mauve,
take it in turns to make eyes and mouths
or grapple with one bright idea.

Yet the neon-lit, plastic dream-bubble
he borrowed from a comic strip---
and which you and I might stretch
to include Hope, Idaho---
here takes in only the upper bunk of the bed
where a naked man, asleep, is strapped.


***The poem is from Paul Muldoon's Quoof. Copyright © 1983
Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber 2003
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