Scenes From Station 30

–Fairview Hospital, North

Steve Mueske

Not long after the baby song ends,
hauling us rudely out of the brackish lake
of sleep, we shuffle from our rooms,
in slippers, hair pressed into whorls
of furious dreaming, some still
wearing the uniform of surrender.

After breakfast, Russell is delivered
in a wheelchair.  Do I know you?
Yes, I say. His brow furrows,
tilled by lightning. We’ll talk later,
after the anesthesia wears off.
Cold scrambled eggs plummet from
the shelf of his lower lip.

Cold outside: smokestack vapor hangs
in the gray air, clinging like a child.
It is a day of dissolution, of grays
and greater grays, the swollen river
too cold to cut veins through the ice.

A cardinal lights on a branch.
Even in this extreme: the controlled
burn of him. I ask for news
of the secret river beneath the city,
blue and black, lights dancing
over the water. He tilts his head;
not the right bird. Brilliant, yes,
and red, but without a speck of ash.

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