PROGNOSIS
The call comes during lunch. She hangs up, resumes her seat, twirls a strand of fettuccine because there is nothing else to do nowexcept finish her lunch. The rest of usare frozen into place—I wantthere to be a noise, here, a crash,some other sound than the coughing kettleand the clink of her fork on the ceramic.Not the stony mushrooms nosing their wayout of the red earth, looking up at usbecause we cannot look at each other,not our confused and belligerent sympathy.It is as if we are searching for somethingmystic, something with questions ratherthan answers—but there is only the basil,flecked amid the sauce like constellations,and our catalogue of silences that we aresuddenly too tired to read or open or bear.
FROM FINAL JUDGE JACK COULEHAN
I found it difficult to choose among the many fine poems delightfully varied in their language, style, and tone. I chose “Prognosis” as the winner partly because of its elegant control and fine images, but mostly because it evokes so well the tension between catastrophe and ordinariness that characterizes so much of medical experience; the tension between Bad News upon which the whole world hangs and the ordinary world of fettuccine and “the clink of her fork on the ceramic.” In medicine—as in all of life—we are often faced with suffering so deep “we cannot look at each other,” and so we struggle alone in “our catalogue of silences.”