Adrienne Rich — Midnight Salvage

1 Up skyward through a glazed triangle I sought the light of a so-called heavenly body : : a planet or our moon in some event and caught nothing nothing but a late wind pushing around some Monterey pines themselves in trouble and rust-limbed Nine o’clock : : July : the light undrained : : that blotted blue that lets has let will let thought’s blood ebb between life- and death-time darkred behind darkblue bad news pulsing back and forth of “us” and “them” And all I wanted was to find an old friend an old figure an old trigonometry still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold 2 Under the conditions of my hiring I could profess or declare anything at all since in that place nothing would change So many fountains, such guitars at sunset Did not want any more to sit under such a window’s deep embrasure, wisteria bulging on spring air in that borrowed chair with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk under photographs of the spanish steps, Keats’ death mask and the English cemetery all so under control and so eternal in burnished frames : : or occupy that office of the marxist-on-sabbatical with Gramschi’s fast-fading eyes thumbtacked on one wall opposite a fading print of the same cemetery : : had memories and death masks of my own : : could not any more peruse young faces already straining for the production of slender testaments to swift reading and current thinking : : would not wait for the stroke of noon to declare all passions obsolete Could not play by the rules in that palmy place : : nor stand at lectern professing anything at all in their hire 3 Had never expected hope would form itself completely in my time : : was never so sanguine as to believe old injuries could transmute easily through any singular event or idea : : never so feckless as to ignore the managed contagion of ignorance the contrived discontinuities the felling of leaders and future leaders the pathetic erections of soothsayers But though I was conspiring, breathing-along with history’s systole-diastole twenty thousand leagues under the sea a mammal heartbeat sheltering another heartbeat plunging from the Farallons all the way to Baja sending up here or there a blowhole signal and sometimes beached making for warmer waters where the new would be delivered : : though I would not see it 4 But neither was expecting in my time to witness this : : wasn’t deep lucid or mindful you might say enough to look through history’s bloodshot eyes into the commerce this dreadnought wreck cut loose from all vows, oaths, patents, compacts, promises : : To see not O my Captain fallen cold & dead by the assassin’s hand but cold alive & cringing : : drinking with the assassins in suit of noir Hong Kong silk pushing his daughter in her famine- waisted flamingo gown out on the dance floor with the traffickers in nerve gas saying to them Go for it and to the girl Get with it 5 When I ate and drank liberation once I walked arm-in-arm with someone who said she had something to teach me It was the avenue and the dwellers free of home : roofless : : women without pots to scour or beds to make or combs to run through hair or hot water for lifting grease or cans to open or soap to slip in that way under arms then beneath breasts then downward to thighs Oil-drums were alight under the freeway and bottles reached from pallets of cardboard corrugate and piles of lost and found to be traded back and forth and figures arranging themselves from the wind Through all this she walked me : : And said My name is Liberation and I come from here Of what are you so afraid? We’ve hung late in the bars like bats kissed goodnight at the stoplights did you think I wore this city without pain? did you think I had no family? 6 Past the curve where the old craftsman was run down there’s a yard called Midnight Salvage He was walking in the road which was always safe The young driver did not know that road its curves or that people walked there or that you could speed yet hold the curve watching for those who walked there such skills he did not have being in life unpracticed but I have driven that road in madness and driving rain thirty years in love and pleasure and grief-blind on ice I have driven it and in the vague haze of summer between clumps of daisies and sting of fresh cow flop odors lucky I am I hit nobody old or young killed nobody left no trace practiced in life as I am 7 This horrible patience which is part of the work This patience which waits for language for meaning for the least sign This encumbered plodding state doggedly dragging the IV up and down the corridor with the plastic sack of bloodstained urine Only so can you start living again waking to take the temperature of the soul when the black irises lean at dawn from the mouth of the bedside pitcher This condition in which you swear I will submit to whatever poetry is I accept no limits Horrible patience 8 You cannot eat an egg You don’t know where it’s been The ordinary body of the hen vouchsafes no safety The countryside refuses to supply Milk is powdered meat’s in both senses high Old walls the pride of architects collapsing find us in crazed niches sleeping like foxes we wanters we unwanted we wanted for the crime of being ourselves Fame slides on its belly like any other animal after food Ruins are disruptions of system leaking in weeds and light redrawing the City of Expectations You cannot eat an egg Unstupefied not unhappy we braise wild greens and garlic feed the feral cats and when the fog’s irregular documents break open scan its fissures for young stars in the belt of Orion