The Traveler

Auguste Forestier began to make art brut while confined 
at the Saint-Alban psychiatric hospital in Lozère, France 
from 1914 to 1958, when he died at the age of 71. 

Forestier’s obsession with trains led him 
to place stones upon the tracks
to see how they would be crushed. 

The train derailed. Five times 
he escaped confinement the court 
ordered, having deemed him unaccountable 

for his actions. Five times the doctors 
sealed him up again, that locked door
with pilasters and gables in pink sandstone, 

portal to a closed world that drawing and carving 
reopened. He found pencil and chalk. 
From discarded fabric and wood, string, 

butcher’s bones, foil, he made animals 
with wolves’ muzzles and fishtails, 
soldiers, and flying monsters with human 

heads and birds’ beaks. The man— 
who never saw the sea—carved boats, a full crew 
getting the motor ready to depart again.

SUSANA H. CASE

Susana H. Case has authored nine books of poetry, most recently If This Isn’t Love (Broadstone, 2023) and is coeditor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake, 2022), awarded Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize.