Adrienne Rich — The Roofwalker

(For Denise Levertov) Over the half-finished houses night comes. The builders stand on the roof. It is quiet after the hammers, the pulleys hang slack. Giants, the roofwalkers, on a listing deck, the wave of darkness about to break on their heads. The sky is a torn sail where figures pass magnified, shadows on a burning deck. I feel like them up there: exposed, larger than life, and due to break my neck. Was it worth while to lay-- with infinite exertion-- a roof I can't live under? --All those blueprints, closing of gaps, measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked, ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading--not with indifference-- about a naked man fleeing across the roofs.