Off the path: the demolished
hospital’s littered
ravine. Single yellow bricks
stamped: Standard Steel, West Branch.
Broken plates, the bottom
of a mug. Jars, jars, jars,
like larvae emerging from mud—
thaw softened them free—I can see
in a week great
industrial moths blacken the sky.
But these are duds
opaque as blown light bulbs,
the broken packed with earth—
earthdark footlights
to a rifled display of brown, outmoded, standardized
shoes—
some with stitches softened loose, tongues
pulled free—
a gag reflex
takes the ravine.
I am its depressor,
who could as easily lift
from this tumbled,
amputated turntable
a thunderous
Freude!
a tide
across the blood-brain barrier
like that tide contained once in these unstoppered
brown glass bottles, narrow, buried
in one deep cache—
music, medication time.
The actress playing the nurse
dispenses pills.
Nothing monstrous darkens the sky, yet I can’t escape
that scene, or the language
that has come to make everything—trees, clouds, frozen lakes
its instrument
of self-correction. I am tripped up
by these severed ends
of an ancient wire fence hidden under
a felt of leaves:
the fences are down.
Asylum is everywhere.