Adrienne Rich - Midnight Salvage lyrics

Up skyward through a glazed triangle 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


Orbit's flaming or cold

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 it's 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 that office
Of the marxist-on-sabbatical

With Gramschi’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

Had never expected hope would form it'self
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 though 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

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 the 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

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?

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
It's 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 cow flop odors
Lucky I am I hit nobody old or young
Killed nobody left no trace
Practiced in life as I am

This horrible patience which is
Part of the work
This patience which wait's 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 limit's Horrible patience

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 it's 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 it's fissures for young stars
In the belt of Orion