Ben Verinder
Spirited away
I like to think that instead of the hospital
they brought you to the bathhouse as a river god,
over the cross-hatched yellow bridge
in the electric-blue lamplight, through the atrium,
past the flowers and the screens, that the bannisters
were not chrome but vermillion, the polished floor teak,
ceiling studded with gold. You smelt of algal bloom.
That they scrubbed you, faces masked to ward off bad spirits,
used all the good water and the best formulas on you,
kept a weather eye on the thermometer, that when they reached
into you they extracted the fouled ropes and bent metals
of your second marriage, very many empty bottles
and all the splintered relics of your childhood.