Triptych at Urgent Care with Possible Ghost Sighting
Jordan Ranft
I’m not dying, just in proximity to it.
Neither is the kid kicking the seat behind
me, moaning into the fleece shoulder
of his mother’s coat, who checks with reception
and returns to the creamsicle bench,
promising just another hour.
Yes, it is strange. Some people
arrive and never leave. Or maybe
leave differently. Who am I to say
they aren’t the sparrow standing
suspiciously close to the entrance?
Mom says dad visits her as a
monarch butterfly. She ties a balloon
to the iron fence every year and
welcomes him home.
The breeze shuffles a candy wrapper
beneath the tortured boxwood.
The kid muffles a scream, burrows
his burning face into his mother’s chest.
It’s worse, knowing how long you will
suffer.
Once, my dad climbed onto the
second story of our house and
screamed at us through
my sibling’s bedroom window.
He laughed so hard he almost fell
off the roof.
Your dead friend’s favorite
song plays at the grocery store.
The mom stands up, cupping
his head to her neck, and says,
we have to try something else.
Someone’s screaming down the hall.
I don’t know why, exactly, but I could
guess.
Your sister’s bedroom window opens
on a windless morning.
The tired receptionist
calls my name.
I’m waiting for something
to scare me because it loves me.
Jordan Ranft is a Best of the Net and Pushcart-nominated poet. He placed third at the 2015 National Poetry Slam representing Team Berkeley. His chapbook, Said The Worms, was published by Wrong Publishing in 2023. His work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Online, Boulevard, Frontier Poetry, Passages North, and others. He lives in Northern California, where he works as a therapist.
Analysis by Ben Cooper
Throughout his poem “Triptych at Urgent Care with Possible Ghost Sighting,” poet Jordan Ranft displays his command over craft, juggling three distinct and thoughtful lyric perspectives with a clever use of page justification and associative image relationships. Ranft’s work speaks to concepts as emotionally and philosophically complex as the human body’s relationship to suffering, the emotional ties we make with those around us, and the ways in which we can’t help ourselves from searching for meaning beyond what exists in front of our eyes. Ranft creates this complex relationship of ideas and images while never once failing to remind us that hope lives at the center of absolutely everything we do.
The lines justified to the left margin establish all you need to know about the reality of the image pool Ranft will be pulling from for the rest of the poem. The poem begins, “I’m not dying, just in proximity to it,” thereby establishing the grey middle ground from which this poetic voice interacts with the waiting room they find themselves within. A child “[moans] into the fleece shoulder / of his mother’s coat,” is forced to wait in this state of agony for hours, learning, eventually, that “it’s worse, knowing how long you will suffer.” This left-justified side of the formal triptych allows Ranft to tie his poem to reality—to create for his audience the basis upon which the rest of his poem is built without allowing his ideas to escape into abstraction.
The center-justified stanzas establish the hope people find in the seemingly innocuous images around them. Moving from the tangible reality of the hospital waiting room into the center of the page, Ranft provides us with some connective material, stating, “Some people / arrive and never leave. Or maybe / leave differently.” This establishes the framework through which we might interpret the subsequent images in the center panel of the triptych. We see that a “breeze shuffles a candy wrapper / beneath the tortured boxwood,” “Your friend’s favorite / song plays at the grocery store,” and “Your sister’s bedroom window opens / on a windless morning.” By interspersing these images between stanzas, Ranft suggests that the people who are no longer at our side can still linger in the world around us, if for no other reason than the fact that they still live in our memory.
As if receding deeper into memory, by the time Ranft moves us to the right margin, we get an incredibly intimate series of images from the perspective of the poetic voice. Each one of these images actualizes the hope established in the triptych’s center panel. If the center of the poem speaks to the various effects of hope through observation, the right shows us these effects through action. In these images, a mother “ties a balloon to the iron fence” in order to welcome her husband home and a father laughs “so hard he almost [falls] off the roof.” These moments show both our ever-present proximity to death and the inescapable yearning we have to overcome its finality.
After weaving his audience between these three image pools, Ranft ends on the right margin—with the same sense of action, pain, and yearning as before. The poem ends from the perspective of the lyric I, stating, “I’m waiting for something / to scare me because it loves me.” This gnomic gesture ties every preceding image into a delicate moment of want that speaks to the very nature of hope. In this moment, Ranft suggests that want, hope, and love, live at the very foundation of life, and we only get to see this because of the poet’s deep command of image and form.