Adrienne Rich — The Night has a Thousand Eyes

1 The taxi meter clicking up loose change who can afford to pay basalt blurring spectral headlights darkblue stabbed with platinum raincoats glassy with evening wet the city gathering itself for darkness into a bitter-chocolate vein the east side with its trinkets the west side with its memories 2 Wherever you had to connect: question of passport, glances, bag dumped late on the emptied carousel departure zones where all could become mislaid, disinvented undocumented, unverified all but the footprint of your soul in the cool neutral air till the jumbo jet groaned and gathered itself over Long Island gathered you into your earth-craving belly-self, that desire 3 Gaze through the sliced-glass window nothing is foreign here nothing you haven’t thought or taught nothing your thumbnail doesn’t know your old poets and painters knew it knocking back their wine you’re just in a cab driven wild on the FDR by a Russian Jew who can’t afford to care if he lives or dies you rode with him long ago 4 Between two silvered glass urns an expensive textile is shouldered it’s after dark now, floodlight pours into the wired boutique there are live roses in the urns there are security codes in the wall there are children, dead, near death whose fingers worked this intricate desirable thing —nothing you haven’t seen on your palm nothing your thumbnail doesn’t know 5 After one stroke she looks at the river remembers her name—Muriel writes it in her breath on the big windowpane never again perhaps to walk in the city freely but here is her landscape this old industrial building converted for artists her river the Lordly Hudson Paul named it which has no peer in Europe or the East her mind on that water widening 6 Among five men walks a woman tall as the tallest man, taller than several a mixed creature from country poverty good schooling and from that position seeing further than many beauty, fame, notwithstanding standing for something else —Where do you come from?— —Como tú, like you, from nothing— Julia de Burgos, of herself, fallen in Puerto Rican Harlem 7 Sometime tonight you’ll fall down on a bed far from your heart’s desire in the city as it is for you now: her face or his private across an aisle throttling uptown bent over clasped hands or staring off then suddenly glaring: Back off! Don’t ask! you will meet those eyes (none of them meeting) 8 The wrapped candies from Cleveland The acclaim of East St. Louis deadweight trophies borne through interboro fissures of the mind in search of Charlie Parker —Where are you sleeping tonight? with whom? in crippled Roebling’s harbor room where he watched his bridge transpire?— Hart Miles Muriel Julia Paul you will meet the eyes you were searching for and the day will break as we say, it breaks as we don’t say, of the night as we don’t say of the night