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CONTENTS

THE ART OF TRANSLATION

FOR AN ANNIVERSARY

MIDNIGHT SALVAGE

CHAR

MODOTTI

SHATTERED HEAD

1941

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

CAMINO REAL

PLAZA STREET AND FLATBUSH

SEVEN SKINS

“THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES”

RUSTED LEGACY

A LONG CONVERSATION

NOTES ON THE POEMS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I don’t know how to measure happiness. The issue is

happiness, there is no other issue, or no other issue

one has a right to think about for other people, to

think about politically, but I don’t know how to

measure happiness.

—George Oppen, letter to June Oppen Degnan,

August 5, 1970

MIDNIGHT

SALVAGE

THE ART OF TRANSLATION

1

To have seen you exactly, once:

red hair over cold cheeks fresh from the freeway

your lingo, your daunting and dauntless

eyes. But then to lift toward home, mile upon mile

back where they’d barely heard your name

—neither as terrorist nor as genius would they detain you—

to wing it back to my country bearing

your war-flecked protocols—

that was a mission, surely: my art’s pouch

crammed with your bristling juices

sweet dark drops of your spirit

that streaked the pouch, the shirt I wore

and the bench on which I leaned.

2

It’s only a branch like any other

green with the flare of life in it

and if I hold this end, you the other

that means it’s broken

broken between us, broken despite us

broken and therefore dying

broken by force, broken by lying

green, with the flare of life in it

3

But say we’re crouching on the ground like children

over a mess of marbles, soda caps, foil, old foreign coins

—the first truly precious objects. Rusty hooks, glass.

Say I saw the earring first but you wanted it.

Then you wanted the words I’d found. I’d give you

the earring, crushed lapis if it were,

I would look long at the beach glass and the sharded self

of the lightbulb. Long I’d look into your hand

at the obsolete copper profile, the cat’s-eye, the lapis.

Like a thief I would deny the words, deny they ever

existed, were spoken, or could be spoken,

like a thief I’d bury them and remember where.

4

The trade names follow trade

the translators stopped at passport control:

Occupation: no such designation—

Journalist, maybe spy?

That the books are for personal use

only—could I swear it?

That not a word of them

is contraband—how could I prove it?

1995

FOR AN ANNIVERSARY

The wing of the osprey lifted

over the nest on Tomales Bay

into fog and difficult gust

raking treetops from Inverness Ridge on over

The left wing shouldered into protective

gesture the left wing we thought broken

and the young beneath in the windy nest

creaking there in their hunger

and the tides beseeching, besieging

the bay in its ruined languor

1996

MIDNIGHT SALVAGE

1

Up skyward through a glazed rectangle 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 the office

of the marxist-on-sabbatical

with Gramsci’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 thought 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 this 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 cowflop 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

1996

CHAR

1

There is bracken there is the dark mulberry

there is the village where no villager survived

there are the hitlerians there are the foresters

feeding the partisans from frugal larders

there is the moon ablaze in every quarter

there is the moon “of tin and sage” and unseen pilots dropping

explosive gifts into meadows of fog and crickets

there is the cuckoo and the tiny snake

there is the table set at every meal

for freedom whose chair stays vacant

the young men in their newfound passions

(Love along with them the ones they love)

Obscurity, code, the invisible existence

of a thrush in the reeds, the poet watching

as the blood washes off the revolver in the bucket

Redbreast, your song shakes loose a ruin of memories

A horrible day . . . Perhaps he knew, at that final instant?

The village had to be spared at any price . . .

How can you hear me? I speak from so far . . .

The flowering broom hid us in a blazing yellow mist . . .

2

This war will prolong itself beyond any platonic armistice. The implanting of political concepts will go on amid upheavals and under cover of self-confident hypocrisy. Don’t smile. Thrust aside both skepticism and resignation and prepare your soul to face an intramural confrontation with demons as cold-blooded as microbes.

The poet in wartime, the Surréalistes’ younger brother

turned realist (the village had to be spared at any price)

all eyes on him in the woods crammed with maquisards ex-

pecting him to signal to fire and save their comrade

shook his head and watched Bernard’s execution

knowing that the random shooting of a revolver

may be the simplest surreal act but never

changes the balance of power and that real acts are not simple

The poet, prone to exaggerate, thinks clearly under torture

knowing the end of the war

would mean no end to the microbes frozen in each soul

the young freedom fighters

in love with the Resistance

fed by a thrill for violence

familiar as his own jaw under the razor

3

Insoluble riverrain conscience echo of the future

I keep vigil for you here by the reeds of Elkhorn Slough

and the brown mouth of the Salinas River going green

where the white egret fishes the fragile margins

Hermetic guide in resistance I’ve found you and lost you

several times in my life You were never just

the poet appalled and transfixed by war you were the maker

of terrible delicate decisions and that did not smudge

your sense of limits You saw squirrels crashing

from the tops of burning pines when the canister exploded

and worse and worse and you were in charge of every risk

the incendiary motives of others were in your charge

and the need for a courage wrapped in absolute tact

and you decided and lived like that and you

held poetry at your lips a piece of wild thyme ripped

from a burning meadow a mimosa twig

from still unravaged country You kept your senses

about you like that and like this I keep vigil for you.

1996

MODOTTI

Your footprints of light on sensitive paper

that typewriter you made famous

my footsteps following you up stair-

wells of scarred oak and shredded newsprint

these windowpanes smeared with stifled breaths

corridors of tile and jaundiced plaster

if this is where I must look for you

then this is where I’ll find you

From a streetlamp’s wet lozenge bent

on a curb plastered with newsprint

the headlines aiming straight at your eyes

to a room’s dark breath-smeared light

these footsteps I’m following you with

down tiles of a red corridor

if this is a way to find you

of course this is how I’ll find you

Your negatives pegged to dry in a darkroom

rigged up over a bathtub’s lozenge

your footprints of light on sensitive paper

stacked curling under blackened panes

the always upstairs of your hideout

the stern exposure of your brows

—these footsteps I’m following you with

aren’t to arrest you

The bristling hairs of your eyeflash

that typewriter you made famous

your enormous will to arrest and frame

what was, what is, still liquid, flowing

your exposure of manifestos, your

lightbulb in a scarred ceiling

well if this is how I find you

Modotti so I find you

In the red wash of your darkroom

from your neighborhood of volcanoes

to the geranium nailed in a can

on the wall of your upstairs hideout

in the rush of breath a window

of revolution allowed you

on this jaundiced stair in this huge lashed eye

these

footsteps I’m following you with

1996

SHATTERED HEAD

A life hauls itself uphill

through hoar-mist steaming

the sun’s tongue licking

leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid

When? When? cry the soothseekers

but time is a bloodshot eye

seeing its last of beauty its own

foreclosure

a bloodshot mind

finding itself unspeakable

What is the last thought?

Now I will let you know?

or, Now I know?

(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue

mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)

Shattered head on the breast

of a wooded hill

laid down there endlessly so

tendrils soaked into matted compost

become a root

torqued over the faint springhead

groin whence illegible

matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt

volumes of sporic changes

hair long blown into far follicles

blasted into a chosen place

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)

revenge on the mouth

packed with its inarticulate confessions

revenge on the eyes

green-gray and restless

revenge on the big and searching lips

the tender tongue

revenge on the sensual, on the nose the

carrier of history

revenge on the life devoured

in another incineration

You can walk by such a place, the earth is made of them

where the stretched tissue of a field or woods is humid

with belovéd matter

the soothseekers have withdrawn

you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus

when that place utters its worn sigh

let us have peace

And the shattered head answers back

I believed I was loved, I believed I loved,

who did this to us?

1996–97

1941

In the heart of pain where mind is broken

and consumed by body, I sit like you

on the rocky shore (like you, not with you)

A windmill shudders, great blades cleave the air and corn is ground

for a peasant century’s bread and fear of hunger

(like that, but not like that)

Pewter sails drive down green water

barges shoulder fallowing fields

(Like then, not then)

If upstairs in the mill sunrise fell low and thin

on the pierced sleep of children hidden in straw

where the mauled hen had thrashed itself away

if some lost their heads and ran

if some were dragged

if some lived and grew old remembering

how the place by itself was not evil

had water, spiders, a cat

if anyone asked me—

How did you get here anyway?

Are you the amateur of drought? the collector

of rains? are you poetry’s inadmissible

untimely messenger?

By what right?

In whose name?

Do you

1997

LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

1

Your photograph won’t do you justice

those wetted anthill mounds won’t let you focus

that lens on the wetlands

five swans chanting overhead

distract your thirst for closure

and quick escape

2

Let me turn you around in your frozen nightgown and say

one word to you: Ineluctable

—meaning, you won’t get quit

of this: the worst of the new news

history running back and forth

panic in the labyrinth

—I will not touch you further:

your choice to freeze or not

to say, you and I are caught in

a laboratory without a science

3

Would it gladden you to think

poetry could purely

take its place beneath lightning sheets

or fogdrip live its own life

screamed at, howled down

by a torn bowel of dripping names

—composers visit Terezin, film-makers Sarajevo

Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses

ineluctable

if a woman as vivid as any artist

can fling any day herself from the 14th floor

would it relieve you to decide Poetry

doesn’t make this happen?

4

From the edges of your own distraction turn

the cloth-weave up, its undersea-fold venous

with sorrow’s wash and suck, pull and release,

annihilating rush

to and fro, fabric of caves, the onset of your fear

kicking away their lush and slippery flora nurseried

in liquid glass

trying to stand fast in rootsuck, in distraction,

trying to wade this

undertow of utter repetition

Look: with all my fear I’m here with you, trying what it

means, to stand fast; what it means to move

5

Beneaped. Rowboat, pirogue, caught between the lowest

and highest tides of spring. Beneaped. Befallen,

becalmed, benighted, yes, begotten.

—Be—infernal prefix of the actionless.

—Be—as in Sit, Stand, Lie, Obey.

The dog’s awful desire that takes his brain

and lays it at the boot-heel.

You can be like this forever—Be

as without movement.

6

But this is how

I come, anyway, pushing up from below

my head wrapped in a chequered scarf a lanterned helmet on this

head

pushing up out of the ore

this sheeted face this lanterned head facing the seep of death

my lips having swum through silt

clearly pronouncing

Hello and farewell

Who, anyway, wants to know

this pale mouth, this stick

of crimson lipsalve Who my

dragqueen’s vocal chords my bitter beat

my overshoulder backglance flung

at the great strophes and antistrophes

my chant my ululation my sacred parings

nails, hair my dysentery my hilarious throat

my penal colony’s birdstarved ledge my face downtown

in films by Sappho and Artaud?

Everyone. For a moment.

7

It’s not the déjà vu that kills

it’s the foreseeing

the head that speaks from the crater

I wanted to go somewhere

the brain had not yet gone

I wanted not to be

there so alone.

1997

CAMINO REAL

Hot stink of skunk

crushed at the vineyards’ edge

hawk-skied, carrion-clean

clouds ranging themselves

over enormous autumn

that scribble edged and skunky

as the great road winds on

toward my son’s house seven hours south

Walls of the underpass

smudged and blistered eyes gazing from armpits

THE WANTER WANTED ARMED IN LOVE AND

DANGEROUS

WANTED FOR WANTING

To become the scholar of : :

: : to list compare contrast events to footnote lesser evils

calmly to note “bedsprings”

describe how they were wired

to which parts of the body

to make clear-eyed assessments of the burnt-out eye: : investigate

the mouth-bit and the mouth

the half-swole slippery flesh the enforced throat

the whip they played you with the backroad games the beatings by

the river

O to list collate commensurate to quantify:

I was the one, I suffered, I was there

never

to trust to memory only

to go back notebook in hand

dressed as no one there was dressed

over and over to quantify

on a gridded notebook page

The difficulty of proving

such things were done for no reason

that every night

“in those years”

people invented reasons for torture

Asleep now, head in hands

hands over ears O you

Who do this work

every one of you

every night

Driving south: santabarbara’s barbarous

landscaped mind: lest it be forgotten

in the long sweep downcoast

let it not be exonerated

but O the light

on the raw Pacific silks

Charles Olson: “Can you afford not to make

the magical study

which happiness is?”

I take him to mean

that happiness is in itself a magical study

a glimpse of the unhandicapped life

as it might be for anyone, somewhere

a kind of alchemy, a study of transformation

else it withers, wilts

—that happiness is not to be

mistrusted or wasted

though it ferment in grief

George Oppen to June Degnan: “I don’t know how

to measure happiness”

—Why measure? in itself it’s the measure—

at the end of a day

of great happiness if there be such a day

drawn by love’s unprovable pull

I write this, sign it

Adrienne

1997

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

till 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 strand, 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

1997

SEVEN SKINS

1

Walk along back of the library

in 1952

someone’s there to catch your eye

Vic Greenberg in his wheelchair

paraplegic GI–

Bill of Rights Jew

graduate student going in

by the only elevator route

up into the great stacks where

all knowledge should and is

and shall be stored like sacred grain

while the loneliest of lonely

American decades goes aground

on the postwar rock

and some unlikely

shipmates found ourselves

stuck amid so many smiles

Dating Vic Greenberg you date

crutches and a chair

a cool wit an outrageous form:

“—just back from a paraplegics’ conference,

guess what the biggest meeting was about—

Sex with a Paraplegic!—for the wives—”

In and out of cabs his chair

opening and closing round his

electrical monologue the air

furiously calm around him

as he transfers to the crutches

But first you go for cocktails

in his room at Harvard

he mixes the usual martinis, plays Billie Holiday

talks about Melville’s vision of evil

and the question of the postwar moment:

Is there an American civilization?

In the bathroom huge

grips and suction-cupped

rubber mats long-handled sponges

the reaching tools a veteran’s benefits

in plainest sight

And this is only memory, no more

so this is how you remember

Vic Greenberg takes you to the best restaurant

which happens to have no stairs

for talk about movies, professors, food

Vic orders wine and tastes it

you have lobster, he Beef Wellington

the famous dessert is baked alaska

ice cream singed in a flowerpot

from the oven, a live tulip inserted there

Chair to crutches, crutches to cab

chair in the cab and back to Cambridge

memory shooting its handheld frames

Shall I drop you, he says, or shall

we go back to the room for a drink?

It’s the usual question

a man has to ask it

a woman has to answer

you don’t even think

2

What a girl I was then what a body

ready for breaking open like a lobster

what a little provincial village

what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells

what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud

what a gone-and-come tidepool

what a look into eternity I took and did not return it

what a book I made myself

what a quicksilver study

bright little bloodstain

liquid pouches escaping

What a girl pelican-skimming over fear what a mica lump

splitting

into tiny sharp-edged mirrors through which

the sun’s eclipse could seem normal

what a sac of eggs what a drifting flask

eager to sink to be found

to disembody what a mass of swimmy legs

3

Vic into what shoulder could I have pushed your face

laying hands first on your head

onto whose thighs pulled down your head

which fear of mine would have wound itself

around which of yours could we have taken it nakedness

without sperm in what insurrectionary

convulsion would we have done it mouth to mouth

mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anus earlobe to nipple

what seven skins each have to molt what seven shifts

what tears boil up through sweat to bathe

what humiliatoriums what layers of imposture

What heroic tremor

released into pure moisture

might have soaked our shape two-headed avid

into your heretic

linen-service

sheets?

1997

“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

1997

RUSTED LEGACY

Imagine a city where nothing’s

forgiven your deed adheres

to you like a scar, a tattoo but almost everything’s

forgotten deer flattened leaping a highway for food

the precise reason for the shaving of the confused girl’s head

the small boys’ punishing of the frogs

—a city memory-starved but intent on retributions

Imagine the architecture the governance

the men and the women in power

—tell me if it is not true you still

live in that city.

Imagine a city partitioned divorced from its hills

where temples and telescopes used to probe the stormy codices

a city brailling through fog

thicket and twisted wire

into dark’s velvet dialectic

sewers which are also rivers

art’s unchartered aquifers the springhead

sprung open in civic gardens left unlocked at night

I finger the glass beads I strung and wore

under the pines while the arrests were going on

(transfixed from neck to groin I wanted to save what I could)

They brought trays with little glasses of cold water

into the dark park a final village gesture

before the villages were gutted.

They were trying to save what they could

—tell me if this is not the same city.

I have forced myself to come back like a daughter

required to put her mother’s house in order

whose hands need terrible gloves to handle

the medicinals the disease packed in those linens

Accomplished criminal I’ve been but

can I accomplish justice here? Tear the old wedding sheets

into cleaning rags? Faithless daughter

like stone but with water pleating across

Let water be water let stone be stone

Tell me is this the same city.

This I—must she, must she lie scabbed with rust

crammed with memory in a place

of little anecdotes no one left

to go around gathering the full dissident story?

Rusting her hands and shoulders stone her lips

yet leaching down from her eyesockets tears

—for one self only? each encysts a city.

1997

A LONG CONVERSATION

—warm bloom of blood in the child’s arterial tree

could you forget? do you

remember? not to

know you were cold? Altercations

from porches color still high in your cheeks

the leap for the catch

the game getting wilder as the lights come on

catching your death it was said

your death of cold

something you couldn’t see ahead, you couldn’t see

(energy: Eternal Delight)

a long conversation

between persistence and impatience

between the bench of forced confessions

hip from groin swiveled

apart

young tongues torn in the webbing

the order of the cities

founded on disorder

and intimate resistance

desire exposed and shameless

as the flags go by

Sometime looking backward

into this future, straining

neck and eyes I’ll meet your shadow

with its enormous eyes

you who will want to know

what this was all about

Maybe this is the beginning of madness

Maybe it’s your conscience . . .

as you, straining neck and eyes

gaze forward into this past:

what did it mean to you?

—to receive “full human rights”

or the blue aperture of hope?

Mrs. Bartender, will you tell us dear

who came in when the nights were

cold and drear and who sat where

well helmeted and who

was showing off his greasy hair

Mrs. Bartender tell me quickly

who spoke thickly or not at all

how you decided what you’d abide

what was proud and thus allowed

how you knew what to do

with all the city threw at you

Mrs. Bartender tell me true

we’ve been keeping an eye on you

and this could be a long conversation

we could have a long accommodation

On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the motel room of a certain time and country, a white plastic saucer of cheese and hard salami, winter radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread, a bottle of red wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable. Someone has brought pills for the infection that is ransacking this region. Someone else came to clean birds salvaged from the oil spill. Here we eat, drink from thick tumblers, try to pierce this thicket with mere words.

Like a little cell. Let’s not aggrandize ourselves; we are not a little cell, but we are like a little cell.

Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words.

A long conversation

pierced, jammed, scratched out:

bans, preventive detention, broken mouths

and on the scarred bench sequestered

a human creature with bloody wings

its private parts

reamed

still trying to speak

A hundred and fifty years. In 1848 a pamphlet was published, one of many but the longest-read. One chapter in the long book of memories and expectations. A chapter described to us as evil; if not evil, out-of-date, naïve and mildewed. Even the book they say is out of print, lacking popular demand.

So we have to find out what in fact that manifesto said. Evil, we can judge. Mildew doesn’t worry us. We don’t want to be more naïve or out-of-date than necessary. Some old books are probably more useful than others.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . . it creates a world after its own image.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed—a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

—Can we say if or how we find this true in our lives today?

She stands before us as if we are a class, in school, but we are long out of school. Still, there’s that way she has of holding the book in her hands, as if she knew it contained the answer to her question.

Someone: —Technology’s changing the most ordinary forms of human contact—who can’t see that, in their own life?

—But technology is nothing but a means.

—Someone, I say, makes a killing off war. You: —I’ve been telling you, that’s the engine driving the free market. Not information, militarization. Arsenals spawning wealth.

Another woman: —But surely then patriarchal nationalism is the key?

He comes in late, as usual he’s been listening to sounds outside, the tide scraping the stones, the voices in nearby cottages, the way he used to listen at the beach, as a child. He doesn’t speak like a teacher, more like a journalist come back from war to report to us. —It isn’t nations anymore, look at the civil wars in all the cities. Is there a proletariat that can act effectively on this collusion, between the state and the armed and murderous splinter groups roaming at large? How could all these private arsenals exist without the export of increasingly sophisticated arms approved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie?

Now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: —I can’t stand that kind of language. I still care about poetry.

All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you’re only

as we were trying

to keep an eye

on the weapons on the street

and under the street

Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can’t get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can’t fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc . . . & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?

You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty,” “probability,” perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s MOST important.

His high-pitched voice with its darker, hoarser undertone.

At least he didn’t walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.

So now your paledark face thrown up

into pre-rain silver light your white shirt takes

on the hurl and flutter of the gulls’ wings

over your dark leggings their leathery legs

flash past your hurling arm one hand

snatching crusts from the bowl another hand holds close

You, barefoot on that narrow strand

with the iceplant edges and the long spindly pier

you just as the rain starts leaping into the bay

in your cloud of black, bronze and silvering hair

Later by the window on a fast-gathering winter evening

my eyes on the page then catch your face your breasts that light

. . . small tradespeople,

shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants—

all these sink gradually into the proletariat

partly because their

diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which

modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the

competition with the large capitalists

partly because their specialized

skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.

Thus, the proletariat is recruited

from all classes of the population. . . .

pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay

the last gash of light abruptly bandaged in darkness

1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth: I wish

you would write a poem

addressed to those who, in consequence

of the complete failure of the French Revolution

have thrown up all hopes

of the amelioration of mankind

and are sinking into an almost epicurean

selfishness, disguising the same

under the soft titles of domestic attachment

and contempt for visionary philosophes

A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe:

the visionaries having survived despite

rumors of complete failure

the words have barely begun to match the desire

when the cold fog blows back in

organized and disordering

muffling words and faces

Your lashes, visionary! screening

in sudden rushes this

shocked, abraded crystal

I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . It would have to contain losses, resiliencies, histories faced; it would have to contain a face—his yours hers mine—by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that “doing well” by one, or some, was immiserating nobody. A true sentence, then, for greeting the newborn. (—Someplace else. In our hopes.)

But where ordinary collective affections carry a price (swamped, or accounted worthless) I’m one of those driven seabirds stamping oil-distempered waters maimed “by natural causes.”

The music’s pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos canciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of traditions of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward.

“it’s the layers of history

we have to choose, along

with our own practice: what must be tried again

over and over and

what must not be repeated

and at what depth which layer

will we meet others”

the words barely begin

to match the desire

and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn’t testify

. . . the eye has become a human eye

when its object has become a human, social object

BRECHT BECOMES GERMAN ICON ANEW

FORGIVEN MARXIST IDEAS

. . . the Arts, you know—they’re Jews, they’re left-wing,

in other words, stay away . . .

So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true

how you still do what you do

your old theories forgiven

—the public understands

it was one thing then but now is now

and everyone says your lungs are bad

and your liver very sad

and the force of your imagination

has no present destination

though subversive has a certain charm

and art can really do no harm

but still they say you get up and go

every morning to the studio

Is it still a thrill?

or an act of will?

Mr. Kunstelaar?

—After so long, to be asked an opinion? Most of that time, the opinions unwelcome. But opinion anyway was never art. Along the way I was dropped by some; others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. Even to have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in, was a point in fact. In case you miss the point: I come from hod-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin—adults and children dispersed into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration— never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives—designated insignificant—as beauty, as terror. They were significant to me and what they had endured terrified me. I knew such a life could have been my own. I also knew they had saved me from it.

—I tried to show all this and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded.

—I have no theories. I don’t know what I am being forgiven. I am my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I still get up and go to the studio—it’s there I find the company I need to go on working.

“This is for you

this little song

without much style

because your smile

fell like a red leaf

through my tears

in those fogbound years

when without ado

you gave me a bundle of fuel to burn

when my body was utterly cold

This is for you

who would not applaud

when with a kick to the breast or groin

they dragged us into the van

when flushed faces cheered

at our disgrace

or looked away this is

for you who stayed

to see us through

delivered our bail and disappeared

This little song

without much style

may it find you

somewhere well.”

In the dark windowglass

a blurred face

—is it still mine?

Who out there hoped to change me—

what out there has tried?

What sways and presses against the pane

what can’t I see beyond or through—

charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language

is that still you?

1997–98

NOTES ON THE POEMS

CHAR

Page 16: Italicized phrases and some images from Leaves of Hypnos, the journal kept in 1942–1943 by the poet René Char while he was a commander in the French Resistance, and from some of Char’s poems. I have drawn on both Jackson Mathews’s and Cid Corman’s translations of Char’s journal in integrating his words into my poem. Char joined the Surrealist movement late and broke with it prior to World War II. It was André Breton who said, “The simplest surrealist act consists of going down into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random.”

MODOTTI

Page 19: Tina Modotti (1896–1942): photographer, political activist, revolutionary. Her most significant artistic work was done in Mexico in the 1920s, including a study of the typewriter belonging to her lover, the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. Framed for his murder by the fascists in 1929, she was expelled from Mexico in 1930. After some years of political activity in Berlin, the Soviet Union, and Spain, she returned incognito to Mexico, where she died in 1942.

In my search for Modotti I had to follow clues she left; I did not want to iconize her but to imagine critically the traps and opportunities of her life and choices.

CAMINO REAL

Page 32: “Can you afford not to make / the magical study / which happiness is?” From Charles Olson, “Variations Done for Gerald Van der Wiele,” in Charles Olson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 83.

Page 32: “George Oppen to June Degnan: . . .” See George Oppen, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 212.

“THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES”

Page 43: The title of the poem is that of a composition played by John Coltrane on the album Coltrane’s Sound, Atlantic Jazz, 1964.

Page 47, section 5, lines 10–12: “. . . the Lordly Hudson / . . . which has no peer / in Europe or the East.” From Paul Goodman, “The Lordly Hudson,” in The Lordly Hudson (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 7.

Page 48, section 6, lines 9–10: “—Where do you come from?— / —Como tú, like you, from nothing—.” See Jack Aguëros, Introduction, Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos, comp. and trans. Jack Aguëros (Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1997), p. xxv.

Page 50, section 8, line 4: “through interboro fissures of the mind.” From Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” pt. VII: “The Tunnel,” line 71.

Page 50, section 8, line 9. In “The Bridge,” Crane hallucinated Edgar Allan Poe in the New York subway; I conjure Crane, Miles Davis, Muriel Rukeyser, Julia de Burgos, and Paul Goodman, or their descendants.

A LONG CONVERSATION

Page 53: “energy: Eternal Delight.” See William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 4: “The Voice of the Devil.”

Page 55: “Maybe this is the beginning of madness. . . .” See Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 95.

Page 58: “The bourgeoisie cannot exist . . . its own image.” See Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), pp. 207–8. “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital. . . .” Ibid., p. 211. See also Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, intro. Eric Hobsbawm (London and New York: Verso, 1998).

Page 59: “—It isn’t nations any more. . . .” Suggested by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia (New York: New Press, 1993).

Page 60: “What is the use of studying philosophy. . . .” See Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 39.

Page 62: “small tradespeople . . . of the population.” See Marx, p. 212.

Page 64: “At the risk of appearing ridiculous.” See Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Guerilla Strategy, Politics and Revolution, ed. David Deutschman (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 1997), p. 211: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love” (“Socialism and Man in Cuba,” 1965).

Page 64: “the memory of traditions of mercy. . . .” See interview with Aijaz Ahmad, in In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, ed. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), p. 111: “. . . we certainly need the most rigorous of theories but we also need to have memories of the traditions of mercy and the struggles for justice. It is only there that any true reconciliation of the universal and the particular is really possible.”

Page 65: “the eye has become a human eye. . . .” Marx, p. 151.

Page 65: “the Arts, you know. . . .” Richard M. Nixon, taped in 1972, quoted in Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 36.

Page 68: “ ‘This is for you. . . .’ ” After Georges Brassens’s “Chanson pour l’Auvergnat,” recorded by Juliette Greco on her album 10 Ans de Chansons, Phillips, 1962.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the journals that first published these poems: Agni: “Plaza Street and Flatbush”; American Poetry Review: “The Art of Translation,” “Camino Real,” and “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”; Long Shot: “Midnight Salvage” (under the title “From the City of Expectations”); Luna Review: “A Long Conversation,” “Plaza Street and Flatbush,” and “Shattered Head”; River City: “For an Anniversary” and “Modotti”; Sulfur: “Char,” “1941,” “Letters to a Young Poet,” and “Rusted Legacy”; The Progressive:“Seven Skins.”

My gratitude to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a fellowship 1994–99, and to the Academy of American Poets for the Dorothea Tanning Prize;

—to Al and Barbara Gelpi, for decades of conversation;

—to Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, Jack Litewka, Jean Valentine, for enduring and critical comradeship in poetry;

—to Frances Goldin and Steven Barclay, for their integrity;

—and for their words at the edge: to Dionne Brand, Clayton Eshleman, June Jordan, and, especially, Michelle Cliff.

Such thanks are always inadequate.

BY ADRIENNE RICH

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

Collected Early Poems 1950–1970

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1986

Your Native Land, Your Life

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984

Sources

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978

The Dream of a Common Language

Twenty-one Love Poems

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

Diving into the Wreck

The Will to Change

Leaflets

Necessities of Life

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

The Diamond Cutters

A Change of World

Copyright © 1999 by Adrienne Rich

All rights reserved

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write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,

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Desktop composition by Justine Burkat Trubey

Book design by Antonina Krass

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

Midnight salvage : poems, 1995–1998 / Adrienne Rich.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-393-046282-6

I. Title.

PS3535.I233M5 1999

811'.54—dc21       98-19293

CIP

ISBN 978-0-393-31984-2

ISBN 978-0-393-34809-5 (e-book)

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