"The Night Has a Thousand Eyes"

American Poetry Review, The, May/Jun 1998 by Rich, Adrienne

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

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

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

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

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 stream the Lordly Hudson

Paul named it which hath no peer in Europe or the East

her mind on that water widening

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?Like you, from nothing

Julia de Burgos, of herself, fallen in Puerto Rican Harlem

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:

Don't ask! you will meet those eyes (none of them meeting)

The wrapped candies from Cleveland the acclaim of East St. Louis

borne like deadweight trophies 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

Notes:

The title of the poem is that of a composition played by John Coltrane on the album Coltrane's Sound (Atlantic Jazz, 1964).

5th section, lines 10-12: . . . the lordly Hudson/. . . which hath no peer in Europe or the East is from Paul Goodman's poem, "The Lordly Hudson," in his volume of that name.

6th section, lines 9-10: -Where do you come from?/-Like you, from nothing-. See Jack Agueros's introduction to Song of the Simple Truth: the Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos. Compiled and translated by Jack Agueros (Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1997).

8th section, line 4: through interboro fissures of the mind is from Hart Crane's The Bridge, VII, "The Tunnel."

line 9: Crane hallucinated Poe in the New York subway; I conjure Crane, Miles Davis, Muriel Rukeyser, Julia de Burgos, and Paul Goodman, or their descendents.