November, Fairbanks, Alaska: An Aubade, and: The Sight of Birds, and: The State: An Orderly’s Remembrance

NOVEMBER, FAIRBANKS, ALASKA: AN AUBADE

We’re heading toward the end, and here now there is something missing—morning. The dawn’s not rousing till most folks in Fairbanks are at their day jobs. Morning sleeps in here this time of year, and who could blame it, as cold as it is. Is it dreaming of the warm dark of the South? In this long night that came in what should’ve been the early evening or even late afternoon most other places, gauged by the clock’s dance with the sun, (nine-to-fivers driving in the night both ways on weekdays) you and I have held hands, had words and dinner, danced, tumbled and tussled before wrestling—my snoring, your nudging, and the dog’s budging only to snuggle closer— and now I need to get up and write this poem before I return to bed, the only warm dark night to be known here, just before the sky lightens to that blue that precedes the peachy dawn so the streetlights can sleep. This new day’s sky affords enough light to see your face and sate my need to see you again before you wake to see me before we rise to get about our days or hopefully stay in bed a little longer.

THE SIGHT OF BIRDS

If the sight of birds in flight moves me—

If the curves of your lip remind me not of Cupid’s bow but of the slight silhouette of a seabird, say, gull or tern, (the quick stroke I’ve drawn in my sketches since a boy)—

If it flutters as if to keep its place in the breeze when you talk and soars when you smile—

If I can’t help but watch the bird fly—

If I were a man who made lists of such things as favorite bird sightings and flat places and distances—vistas, then the sight of you moving with the grace of swallows in chase of their prey must move me to imagine a distant place with mountains that afford a view of the flat peaceful sea and soaring shorebirds—a place I want to be.

THE STATE: AN ORDERLY’S REMEMBRANCE

In continuous operation since 1842 and at one point the world’s largest mental hospital, originally called The Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum, the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville is simply called The State by locals and The ‘Sylum by some who worked there.

I had to brush some of the patients’ hair and teeth. There was this doctor, the patients liked him. Course, he was white. Said he was Polish. Wasn’t of this nation. Taught me the word languid. He wrote it on they charts. When I got home looked in the dictionary for the meaning.

Come to find it’s got more than one meaning, but they’s all about the same, not a hair’s difference really. Come here, made a home for hisself. Talked funny, it took patience to understand him. This not his birth language, but I got better at getting his Polish

accent. No, wasn’t no Black doctors. Polish shoes, cook, clean, or work fields was the means in which most of us made a living. Languid, a good word for being within a hair’s breadth of dead from tussling with them patients like I done many days fore going home.

Things had gone terrible wrong in his home country. Come here after World War II. Polish folks was refugees. Working with patients at the ‘Sylum showed me just how mean in the heart folks is to those meek as a hare. Some folks ended up there in they languid

states ‘cause folks couldn’t stand when they wasn’t languid. Had a working farm; growed food like at home. Collards, corn, okra with them little hairs that itch. Raised hogs and cows too. Made Polish sausage. Farm was tended by help-patients, meaning we tended the hands. Yeah, they kept patients...