For some reason, this 10-year-old post, about an abandoned asylum in Totowa, NJ, consistently generates interest on this site -- and, yes, the information posted there is out-of-date by several years. The North Jersey Training Center has long since been demolished and replaced with a St. Joseph's Health facility.
However, more than a decade later, I offer this new poem about the same location:
Matins for Totowa
On the Feast of St. Blaise,
I wake to a hazy memory:
a criss-cross of wax pressed to my neck
at the altar of St. James of the Marches.
This church still stands on Totowa Road,
decades later, in the borough I was raised.
Here, graves outnumber the living
and the families who bear their names.
This tightness around my neck
reminds me of the ill-fitting clothes
purchased by my mother
at a discount store called Two Guys From Harrison.
We used to walk there when I was a boy
because Mom didn’t drive.
We’d hurry down Riverview Drive,
overlooking the glen on Vreeland Avenue.
Here, spread over 180 acres,
the North Jersey Training School complex
housed the “developmentally disabled”
behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.
When I was an altar boy at St. James,
Fr. Lynch, fresh from Vietnam, gathered me
to assist him for devotions at the center’s chapel,
where the pews were always full.
Full-throated Rosaries were half-sung
by the women and young children who lived there,
proclaiming the "thee," thou" and "thy"
in every "Hail Mary" with loud exclamations.
Because “you" and "your" did not invoke the Lord.
The archaic words invoked poetry,
and the poetry invoked magic
that today conjures my morning prayer:
I beseech thee, St. Blaise,
unmute the muffled voices
from the abandoned asylum of my past.
Give thy breath to every forgotten grave.
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