Four Freedoms Park

^{Roosevelt Island, New York City}

^{The fourth is freedom from fear . . .
—Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
Annual Message to Congress January 6, 1941}

^{The weed is the Nemesis of human endeavor . . .
—Henry Miller}

Then—as if someone had switched on a black light in the sky—
 
the traceries of dread just visible all around her, the curving
       trajectories of each possible disaster
 
once seen, now indelible
 
*
 
Bristling stems of mugwort sheared to resemble a lawn
 
rhizomatic: ineradicable
 
each torn scrap giving rise 
to a new plant
 
hundred 
handed
 
*
 
The Penitentiary Hospital
The New York City Lunatic Asylum 
The Blackwell Island Workhouse 
The Smallpox Hospital
The Charity Hospital
 
“our standing army of paupers, criminals, and sick poor” 
 
This whole repurposed
Island
 
dry sponge of rootstalks, map
 
of the neural pathways 
tunneled out
 
by fear
 
*
 
Her eight-year-old at the beach adorning
 
his ring of sandcastles with bits of shell and twig reciting the “Day 
of Infamy” speech, “we will not only defend ourselves
 
to the uttermost
but will make it very certain
 
that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.” The crumbling 
gray crenellations
 
*
 
The smallpox 
hospital “our only 
landmarked ruin”
 
“No Trespassing: Structure is unstable” the winsome
 
insinuations 
of bindweed
 
at its feet
its gaping gneiss face blushed
 
with Virginia creeper its body a copse of sumac
 
*
 
In Korea, smallpox is referred to as “Your Majesty” in an effort to 
      appease the god.
 
Eradicated circa 1980. 
Who now will ride
 
the horses made of straw 
made to tempt the smallpox
 
spirits to ride home? 
 
*
 
Plaques of cellophane 
 
stillness
subdue the East River
 
The tram released like a dispensation across the swollen sky “the line
      of flight
 
is part of the rhizome. These lines 
always tie back to one another.”
 
Garbage circulating underground 
soundlessly, a system
 
of pneumatic tubes
 
*
 
The monument’s honed granite 
perpendiculars
 
a luxury of specific intention, like all luxuries most
 
poignant at its defined 
edges, subject
 
to encroachment, exhaustion
 
riprap
loosestrife, prostrate spurge

From You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024), edited by Ada Limón. Copyright © 2024 Milkweed Editions and the Library of Congress. Used with the permission of the author. Published in Poem-a-Day on April 20, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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