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The Visions of Bertie Hoskins
Poplar Bluff, Missouri, 1940
Fulton State Hospital, the first public mental institution west of the
Mississippi River, in 1851 admitted its first 67 patients. . . . This
institution was to provide physical care for societal "lunatics."
Treatment approaches in the mid-1900s advanced to keep up with the
rapidly growing hospital. Electrotherapy, insulin and metrozol shock
treatment, and prefrontal lobotomies were all performed with the
more serious patients.
—History of Fulton State Hospital, MO Department of Mental Health
I.
Show me again.
My linden canopy,
leaf-end
dissolving
into sky,
my envelope of skin.
The power
is off, at last,
those million stingers,
that bed
in the white room,
the doctor's
face
breaking like a bag of poison
over me.
Let him be gone,
let him disperse,
let him disband
into the air
with my daughter
and her daughters—
my husbands and my
son, let them
flee
into the bright
dangerous world.
I carry God in my dark
eyes.
My brothers
squatting at our mother's
table every evening
while the dinner
biscuits bloomed
from her hands for them,
saying—
Hannah,
you old digger
(say: Cherokee),
no wonder the sister here
thinks she talks
to the spirits,
can't keep the skirt
pulled down.
It's that dark strain,
shows worst in a woman.
Their thin white skin
couldn't hold in a soul:
their bad hearts dropped
them in the dirt—
I hear
the father-blood,
exploding in their chests
like the current in wires
that scorched my mind.
II.
Ice all night
and now
the giant crosses
laid low
all the way down the road.
Hum, hum,
the voice of the Lord came unto
Samuel
as he lay in his bed
saying
come to me come to me
until he rose
and heard:
God will burn,
temper all evil.
The flesh
is a sagging sack of decay
and the wires
hummed through my head
all the day
nor did Jesus turn from me
in that hour
of need
nor did the eye of God
blink me
out of existence—
hum hum, the fire did
not consume
but contained
me, chosen by
the hand that formed me.
I was warm, even
in the winter
of my brothers' staring,
even in that ice.
My mother's house is
dark—
and how they wandered
behind their lamps,
their false flames,
through the rooms with their groping
big fingers,
their farmers' muscles,
their weak,
their brittle veins.
Consider the lilies,
consider every little
brown sparrow
that feeds
in the fields.
But no, they would bind
my arms,
they would have me
driven away.
Place of rest:
of the restless,
the restive current,
shock
of the electric light
the morning after
treatment,
its golden globe
the devil's face
his hot tongue
licking my cheek,
then a tongue
of fire
spiraled from my mouth—
a thousand
bees—
every bud in my
mother's garden
sleeved in ice,
cold coffin
for a seed's core.
III.
Show me again.
Man, behold thy mother,
woman,
behold thy son.
I laid me down
with a pale husband
and bore a pale brood.
O daughter,
you might have been dark
like me—
I laid me down
with a stranger and bore
the wrath of my father.
In heaven will
be no marriage
or giving in marriage,
will be no female and male,
no white man
and Indian,
no light
apart from dark.
These storms of late—
little apocalypse.
And look,
when I stand
at the fields' hedgerows
I smell the burning—
sunrise bleeding day.
My children deny me,
but let that go,
let them go, the children
of the body.
Let them go be wed
if they will, embed
themselves in the old way:
husbands, brothers,
wives, all
with their English names, name of the
father,
the father not in heaven but
in the ground,
grounded as the wires
that they
fastened to me
were grounded at the root
of the bed
where they tied me down just like
the root
of the lindens,
but the lindens
submit neither to the day
nor night nor
are they destroyed
by the lightning
or hail
or the new moons of my nails
in these bark
walls where I still speak
my mother tongue, I
die to this world, embalmed
with dappled light.
IV.
Rebirth, I want
to say. Resurrection.
Call it
a recollection.
I once met
the one called Satan,
I remember him,
limb by limb
he appeared a white whirl,
dust, blue eyes,
then a tongue of yellow flame,
then the arms and,
walking down the road (it
was a road)
toward me,
a young man of words,
of the world,
singing a hallelujah,
glossolalia.
The devil hath power
to assume a pleasing shape—
my body
with its maps
of vein and vessel,
stitched tight
at the neck—
he had me,
he surrounded
me,
and then there was the room
where the ghosts
stood a-watch,
and then the black eyes
of Christ
fell upon me.
Where was my father?
Call
no man father
but only your father
who is in heaven,
behold,
your mother,
remember the dark womb
of her lindens
whose limbs reach unto the ground,
lo, even
unto the roots
from which spring worms
and grubs
who have fed on the mortal
remains which
are all that remain
of those brothers—
call
no man brother
who renders his sister
up to fire.
Each space among the branches
a great gap,
a tear in the sky—
from there
twist down
sun, shadows,
in gold threads, in black—
I see heaven,
God's eye,
that darkling gaze.
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Sarah Kennedy is the author of four books of poems, including