Adrienne Rich — Tendril

1 Why does the outstretched finger of home probe the dark hotel room like a flashlight beam on the traveller, half-packed, sitting on the bed face in hands, wishing her bag emptied again at home Why does the young security guard pray to keep standing watch forever, never to fly Why does he wish he were boarding as the passengers file past him into the plane What are they carrying in their bundles what vanities, superstitions, little talismans What have the authorities intercepted who will get to keep it 2 Half-asleep in the dimmed cabin she configures a gecko aslant the overhead bin tendrils of vine curling up through the cabin floor buried here in night as in a valley remote from rescue Unfound, confounded, vain, superstitious, whatever we were before now we are still, outstretched, curled, however we were Unwatched the gecko, the inching of green through the cracks in the fused imperious shell 3 Dreaming a womb’s languor volleyed in death among fellow strangers she has merely slept through the night a nose nearby rasps, everyone in fact is breathing the gecko has dashed into some crevice of her brain, the tendrils retract orange juice is passed on trays declarations filled out in the sudden dawn 4 She can’t go on dreaming of mass death this was not to have been her métier she says to the mirror in the toilet a bad light any way you judge yourself and she’s judge, prosecutor, witness, perpetrator of her time ‘s conspiracies of the ignorant with the ruthless She’s the one she’s looking at 5 This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic and besides she’s not confessing her mind balks craving wild onions nostril-chill of eucalyptus that seventh sense of what’s missing against what’s supplied She walks at thirty thousand feet into the cabin sunrise crashing through the windows Cut the harping she tells herself You’re human, porous like all the rest 6 She was to have sat in a vaulted library heavy scrolls wheeled to a desk for sieving, sifting, translating all morning then a quick lunch thick coffee then light descending slowly on earthen-colored texts but that’s a dream of dust frail are thy tents humanity facing thy monologues of force She must have fallen asleep reading 7 She must have fallen asleep reading The woman who mopped the tiles is deliquescent a scarlet gel her ligaments and lungs her wrought brain her belly’s pulse disrupt among others mangled there the chief librarian the beggar the man with the list of questions the scrolls never to be translated and the man who wheeled the scrolls 8 She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove a vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer rearranging the past in a blip coherence smashed into vestige not for her even the thought of her children’s children picking up one shard of tile then another laying blue against green seeing words in three scripts flowing through vines and flowers guessing at what it was the Levantine debris Not for her but still for someone?