(for Charles Kerns 8.9.1944 931)

Hannah is a picture among the graves,
her long hair whipping about in a wonder
of dark curls, spring rain unpredictable as madness.
She scans the rows of headstones, searching
for her great grandfather who retains his past,
his name, among the nameless dead of the asylum.

Two-thousand dead at the Athens Asylum
for the Insane, and their numbered graves
tip and slide into corrosion, sink into the past.
19, 84, 930: few remember, or visit, or wonder –
each number a page in the landscape’s story, searching
for its reader, its interpreter of madness.

And what of madness?
Hannah seeks the secrets of the asylum:
intemperance could have set his loved ones searching
for assistance; or perhaps he was just mean and grave
or rakish, as her family has often wondered –
they were too young when he died to recall his past.

But from the dark eyes of the attic windows, the past
looms, spreading shadows that can drive one to madness.
How can she not think of him, how can she not wonder
about those days before Thorazine, the horrors of the asylum,
electric shock and lobotomies sending men to early graves
while the locals lunched on the hospital grounds, searching

for stones to skim across blue lakes. This search
for meaning haunts her family for generations past,
so they take up a collection, add his name to the grave-
but this, they know, is no cure for madness.
Does his ghost remain tethered to the asylum –
just one of many reported to roam in wonderment

at their own losses? Do they watch in silent wonder
at our modern advances? How Hannah finds herself, searching
for hereditary secrets etched in the records of the asylum:
For a glimpse of her future, she unearths her past,
whether she find, love, or pain, or madness.
So hard to stifle that chill at these graves

as she wonders if the madness will strike her.
She searches the past: is there a warning in the DNA
engraved on the tomb of her heart – or asylum?