The Inviolate
Carolyn, New Orleans
seems so far away…tonight
the valley’s lights
keep a planetary distance…there is
only the shallow
comfort of gestures left
like dropping
more ice in the gin knowing, as it melts,
that I will fail
to make you feel I understand: how
quickly that city
can collapse; how, as you walk
on the waterfront,
the buildings fall into piles
of plywood left
by workmen—hiding black water;
and how the beam
scanning them is not a lighthouse’s
but a cop’s flashlight
scattering shadows. It is in this split
second that you are
or are not saved. What’s strange is the indifference
I felt walking back through
the French Quarter, thinking of nothing, nothing
but the narrow streets
and how the sky was oil-colored like a bay
where cigarette butts float
in their dense constellations
Nothing I saw
that night could be deciphered, although
I knew the balconies’
black, twisted scripts must say something
about death—after all,
there were the flowers. And I remember
how a whore
behind the flowers seemed to wave, which made no sense
since we were neither
meeting nor leaving. I think her dark
arm moved like a branch—
simply because she was so uncertain.
If there are times
we can take comfort in denial, this was one:
I heard my steps
continue… And if there are times
a woman has no defense
but her own mind, you must have
denied, too,
for a while, what your body couldn’t.
Even though long after
the body healed, your mind would still remember
Waking covered
by his shadow, which was like not waking
at all. And I know,
sometimes, in this total terror
the mind is free
to imagine itself calmly above violence,
the way the raw
light of dawn hovered over you hours later.
It wasn’t being draped
over the stranger’s lap on the chipped steps
of a row house
you remember, or the blue towels pressed
to your wounds,
but the others quickly glancing away
as if you were
a truer piéta. You must have known,
then, death
is just like women watching from the windows
before turning
away. There’s so little, finally, to say
about these events
which are and are not the same, except I’m afraid
of what you saw:
that compassion and words do not matter—
that what lasts
beyond them is the reality of workmen leaving
with black lunch boxes
at 5 am, as wives watch a few minutes
from the windows—
and that all I can do is watch lights rest
in the valley, as if
they had crossed some great distance, and yet
failed—like so many
planets, after burning through layers
of mystery, arriving
nearer us, but pale. Without orbit. Smaller
than we’d expected
as if, in the longer struggle of becoming accessible
to us, they were stilled.
Ann Snodgrass recieved degrees from the University of Iowa (B.A.), Johns Hopkins University (M.A.), and University of Utah (Ph.D.). She has taught literature, writing, and women’s studies courses at several universities both here and abroad. Her poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in dozens of journals, including: PARIS REVIEW; PARTISIAN REVIEW; NEW REPUBLIC; APR; POETRY; HARVARD REVIEW; NEW LETTERS; GRAND STREET & TRIQUARTERLY. She’s published two volumes of poetry (Portal & Fields Across Which No Birds Fly); a chapbook (NO DESCRIPTION OF THE WORLD); two volumes of translation from the Italian (The Hippopotamus & Three Stations); and a collection of critical essays (Knowing Noise). She’s received awards from the Academy of American Poets; Center for Book Arts; Chester H. Jones Foundation; the Fulbright Foundation; and the PEN American Center for her work.
