Survivors. Reading about the glow boys this morning.
The unemployed enticed with $60 to fix the core
of the nuclear plant. In space suits they jump
down into it. Acid rain, acid fog. “Just brush it off.”
The screen I stare at, typesetting, low level,
the low lying words. Statistics for jumpers:
only one fatal cancer per 100. Only!
You look around to make sense of the forms,
bodies glowing with pain, campfires flickering
in the Oakland hills, where people are living in the rain,
no place else to go. The tv camera, hungry for news,
searches out the clammy tent where children lie bundled,
then leaves.
Every fact adds up but the word depression
still isn’t officially used.
Survival is a repetitive process, days revolving
tasks completed or not, new ones streaming before you,
each day centered around food and sleep and wake
and talk. You follow this pattern of living set by
the dark and the light. Or break into pockets of
humming night, awake, catching up, getting ahead,
if only all the time could be used.
Surviving my mother’s and grandmother’s deaths this year,
sets me singular into the world. Finally not webbed
in their common life. Not directed or defined by
their concern or need or even love. No longer
a daughter. No longer younger.
The transitory myth of family. All we’ve ever had
to believe we belong.
Yet I belong. To the glow boys, to the people
camping in the hills, to young girls asking
for regard and strength, the food waiting to be
cooked for all. Yet I belong to those I touch
and work with. And to the dead also, and what
they have done. And whose beliefs and laughter
run through me and whose silence I turn to words.
My grandmother is that old woman in her patchwork
clothes, homeless, hat over thin grey hair,
pushing a cart of tin cans along Market Street.
