Nude Descending an Empire

In My Solitude

38 In My Solitude There is so much to say of love. The high, tiptoeing piano notes dancing round her, head down, then to look up with those eyes— the way light on railroad tracks at night gives itself to you, even as it stays upon the rails, chained to the cold steel horizon—and pronounce a perfect syllable faceted and polished from every side. The way, physicists say, our lives require ten dimensions for one plus one to equal two, or one, or even three, or none, for the poplar trees to rise, to root in winter sky, pulse the summer dirt, for the battered tripe to fry, for a young woman to come home from the fair sweet-talked over and knocked up by a jazz man, and then for Billie to be there standing beside the Victrola in Alice Dean’s good-timing house, singing along with Bessie Smith, as the other girls danced and squatted down, no hands, 39 over coffee table corners, to pick up tips. Once you’ve heard the softness, the sheets of moonlight gathered off the river, what does it mean to read she was raped by a neighbor when she was eleven? where does that act, that fact occur—as if it could be transferred, or quarantined, contained within a distinct moment, with a start and end in time. As if it were not still happening: the folds gathering themselves up the well drilled through her into the water table of sorrow, every time somewhere in a café behind the curtains of everyday conversation—knives and forks dropped rattling, silver, against cups and plates in rubber dish tubs—someone hears, on a stereo, pushed through a speaker, a note of her voice. As if the girl were not right then unspeakable inside the sheets of moonlight stripped off the river (the ache in shine, the shining ache) gathered up off the streets, and sent forward— with head down, then looking up— to you. And you. And you. Like the signals 40 we send year after year into space, traveling from one empty planet to the next. Pearled ivory sole-taps stepping across the dark for whoever is out there to hear. ...