You made me miss the fourth quarter,
he said after they brought me around.
The last game of the finals.
And thus I re-entered this life laughing.
My confréres were an arsonist, and exhibitionist,
a molester and several varieties of schizophrenic.
I was not in their league and we all knew it.
The zippers unzipping, the daily fire alarms,
the whispering of plots against the staff…
Our volleyball games were truly bizarre, even in
this context of the bizarre. We were not a team.
Mostly the ball dragged over the net unnoticed,
rolling in slow motion then stalling in a shadowy corner.
We had bigger fish to fry.
In art therapy I watercolored Hamlet and Ophelia.
She slings flowers like flaming javelins.
He menaces something stage left. Dozens of
empty theatre seats are painstakingly inked in.
At times, it was almost cozy in the oxblood leather
chair where I scribbled and stared out at the river,
and ruminated unnoticed. Difficult to fathom anymore,
all those lost months since summer.
It seemed a snug cave refuge against
a season of record cold, with all the demands
of prolonged hibernation. Soft-voiced nurses
piloted our anxious families on visiting day.
They might have been hayseeds on some package tour.
Lightless afternoons we promenaded in silence
floating over the frozen grounds: fifteen adult charges
alongside our keepers, in a procession of the damaged
and dishonored, each of us sensing
and wordlessly dreading the thaw.