Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center

by Victoria Korth

 
 

One needs to be a little lost to find it
on a Dutchess County knoll. Building 85
still stands. Look it up. Or better, go yourself.
Its lower story windows broken, boarded,
but the other thirteen floors appear intact enough 
to taunt the empty village outside its gates 
with State employment. Our lives, that “campus” 
and my journeying, have crossed: first as a child, 
and later as a doctor who made some kinds of work done there 
my habit, my profession, and today, when heading home 
from Danbury in the snow, with no one quite expecting me.
I turned off at Wingdale, followed ditches lined with cow vetch 
dropping on the downside of a sudden rise. There: 
bakery, laundry, low-slung dorms, brick housing 
for unlicensed pharmacists, a minor stadium, and, hidden 
in the trees, burial ground with rotting gate and lettered arch—
patients abandoned to the place—every inch dissolving, 
stripped of flashing, grizzling with mineral ooze. 
And over it all, like speaking eye, the glass high-rise, lobotomy 
suite, insulin tubs and narrow beds for the electrically changed. 
As my father was, strapped down in ’74,
having been there months and shrugging his way 
beneath the gaping fence. He told us once he was tired 
of trading cigarettes for whiskey in the tunnel 
between the dorms, where sex was sold, and coke 
and heroin. Said he’d aimed for Armonk, IBM’s mainframe 
where he’d been a salesman, been okay, planned to show up 
like Santa in a limo, got as far as Ureles Liquor, collapsed 
beside the tracks, was brought back in, sent upstairs. 
No wonder he made us stay at the sticky picnic table 
in the shade when my mother took us there to see him. 
No wonder he was afraid to look the orderlies in the eye, 
or so I remember seeing, though it may be 
I imagined what I saw, eyes alive with what he didn’t tell, 
what I felt and what I’ve tried to know so well
it would unknow itself, unwind to nothing, disappear, 
why I am unprepared for this cold fear
and rage—could I tear that grim museum
off the map, would that tear him, tear me in two—
no child should ever be there, or have been, no one. 

 

Korth+photo.jpg

Victoria Korth lives in Rochester NY where she has a psychiatric practice caring for the chronically mentally ill. Poems have appeared in Broad River Review, Ocean State Review, LEON Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and Barrow Street. The author of Cord Color (Finishing Line Press), she is working to publish her first full length manuscript. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.  

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