How Do You Praise the Sunlight?

20 HOW DO YOU PRAISE THE SUNLIGHT? My last dawn watch went down in the darkness of 1973. In Santiago de Chile: under the state of siege holding my breath, playing chess with boredom and terror. Decrees kept changing the rules, until we learned and forgot how to move. But how do you forget gunshots, clumps of them like braille pocking the night when night was what you read, or got through, by the nerves at your finger-tips? Night would not end. But faded into day after day of clam stew laced with coriander, dead green pool in a bowl. It got left under the warm lumps of morning bread turning to stone in the afternoon; teased almost out of reach by the white sweet conger eel, the hare roasted in lemon, these delicacies. And hushed-up, but not for good, 21 by the pulp tongues of a sea urchin, the flesh star that stared up from our plate whispering of iodine, the taste closest to life. That was the night Dame Margot Fonteyn came to dance a benefit for the government of landlords, generals, piranhas and crocodiles. Showing that art, too, is close to life. This I do not forget. And every night before curfew flickered with nightlifepitiless wings of victory, despair spreading her legs— heartcrushing swan bosoms flurrying through the doors of a luxury chain hotel, or hissing from the shadows of the Parque Forestal my family has nothing to eat buy me Night into day reeked. Truckloads of fish the protein of the poor were left to rot locked in garages, in the Central Market, 22 while prices rose. There. In that tight-lipped city under those mountains, snow-shawled Andes rising and sinking through the smog, through burning eyelids, a long hour from the sea. Pound for pound, a worker was worth less than a fish. And dropped out of sight coming home one evening or early morning, on the way to work, on either side of that bedwhere the deep depression he left dragged down the heart of his wife, rocking his children, went on rippling in friends, relatives, neighbors fainter and fainter— until of the emptiness left nothing was left but a slight warp in the sunlight, tired of leaning on its few sooty palm trees; nothing, but shiver dusk running through the crowds craning and shoving, limp shades of brown and black hauling up into the gaspy, rickety bus... 23 Feeling this now, it sinking in I realize the intense stupor we lived in then. Now, across the street, hulking bushy maples like old softy hills are gilded pink. How do you praise the sunlight? The first reluctant car starts up: cold motor hacking and spewing clouds of oil. You praise it getting up raging, thickheaded refusing to disappear until the harsh beautiful bloodbath of day keeps pouring in— and dregs of the night glitter with dead fascists ...