Allison Titus

Snow and after, each bidding and restlessness turns the goat’s heart fallow: long hours of ice and bluster: asymmetry of wind. Say every goat has in its heart a field, and each field, a goat: the slumber of muscle and grass is still a different elegy. Every heart writes a different letter of winter to its cold. Icicles on sheet metal, bucket frozen in the well. Once there was no language for the weather, just The sky is low and birdless; or The sky is a box of wings.

II.   Dalldorf Asylum: House 4, Ward B The white coats still come.Fraulein Unbekaant, they call me. Miss Unknown. One asks, Do I hear         voices       Do I          see things. The doctors here are not very well informed. When they appear at the foot of my bed, alabaster and looming        I hide my face in the sheets coarsened and brailled as if boiled in the well of a thousand drowned birds. So much worse is this quiet than the river’s drift and silt. Here I have only the rasp and cough of the woman bunked nearest me drooled to choking. On the floor, a puddle of saliva thickens.

I.  Open Ward at the Elisabeth Hospital, Berlin, 1920 My tongue is a spoon. Does that explain it?    Door opens    door closes. White coats stammer the threshold. They draw the sheets      again     and again I give them nothing.     My mouth is a splinter        not telling. They ask if I fell from the bridge or did I jump.         They ask my name.