Photo by M.H. Zahner
Image courtesy of Niagara Falls Public Library
Annie Edson Taylor
first to survive Niagara Falls in a barrel
she is our heroine.
The Zone glitters like a mirage
an abandoned city
à la Tarkovsky’s Stalker
fizzing with radiation.
Taylor—praise her—sleepwalks
on the lawn of the soporific
hospital. She blinks,
eyes yellow, shadowed
by the central chimney.
Is it a lighthouse in the desert?
The Zone wears her dream
like a gown. The hospital
wears the rubble like a gown.
Taylor wears a long black dress
& a fruit hat. Front stairs
of the hyperacute hospital,
Taylor coughs, on her knees.
How, you wonder,
did she get here? Don’t ask me.
I wanted to write a poem
to exalt a nice thing.
Yet here she is, spasming,
spitting a dark thread.
“Stop!” you say, “Don’t go in!”
Yet in she goes.
Her black dress slips off
& her fruit hat. She is naked
walking the hallway
past rooms of box-spring beds.
Here is a room heaped
with clothes: firefighter boots,
gas masks. Sooty tables,
murky slime. An arthritic tree
curls in a shattered window.
A box-spring so tiny
It could be a doll’s bed.
Taylor stops, bows low,
palms together, mumbling words
I can’t even hear.
I’m tempted to remind her
she died sixty-five years
before Chernobyl.
But now she’s alert,
back straight, listening
with her whole body
for what? I beg her
to put on the fruit hat,
just for the end of the poem.
It’s not too late!
But she keeps tossing it
onto a pile
of melted toys.
Source: John Wall Barger. The Mean Game. Windsor, Ont.: Palimpsest Press, 2019.
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