Adrienne Rich — Plaza Street and Flatbush

1. On a notepad on a table tagged for the Goodwill the word Brooklyn on the frayed luggage label the matchbox cover the name Brooklyn in steel-cut script on a watermarked form on a postcard postmarked 1961 the word Brooklyn on the medal for elocution on the ashtray with the bridge the inscription Brooklyn in the beige notebook of the dead student's pride in her new language on the union card the love letter the mortgaged insurance policy somewhere it would say, Brooklyn on the shear of the gull on the ramp that sweeps to the great cable-work on the map of the five boroughs the death certificate the last phone bill in the painter's sighting of light unseen til now, in Brooklyn 2. If you had been required to make inventory of everything in the apartment if you had had to list the acquisitions of a modest life punctuated with fevers of shopping -- a kind of excitement for her but also a bandage over bewilderment and for him, the provider the bandage of providing for everyone if you had had to cram the bags with unworn clothing unused linens bought by a woman who but just remembered being handed through the window of a train in Russia if you had had to haul the bags to the freight elevator if you had been forced to sign a declaration of all possessions kept or given away in all the old apartments in one building say at Plaza and Flatbush or on Eastern Parkway? Art doesn't keep accounts though artists do as they must to stay alive and tend their work art is a register of light 3. The painter taking her moment -- a rift in the clouds “ and pulling it out -- mucous srand, hairy rootlet sticky clew to the labyrinth pulling and pulling forever or as long as this grain of this universe will be tested the painter seizing the light of creation giving it back to its creatures headed under the earth