Time's Power by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

HARPERS FERRY

Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads

glittering at each other’s throats, the Virginia mountains fading

across the gorge, the October-shortened sun, the wooden town,

rebellion sprouting encampments in the hills

and a white girl running away from home

who will have to see it all. But where do I get this, how

do I know how the light quails from the trembling

waters, autumn goes to ash from ridge to ridge

how behind the gunmetal pines the guns

are piled, the sun drops, and the watchfires burn?

I know the men’s faces tremble like smoky

crevices in a cave where candle-stumps have been stuck

on ledges by fugitives. The men are dark and sometimes pale

like her, their eyes pouched or blank or squinting, all by now

are queer, outside, and out of bounds and have no membership

in any brotherhood but this: where power is handed from

the ones who can get it to the ones

who have been refused. It’s a simple act,

to steal guns and hand them to the slaves. Who would have thought

it.

Running away from home is slower than her quick feet thought

and this is not the vague and lowering North, ghostland of deeper

snows

than she has ever pictured

but this is one exact and definite place,

a wooden village at the junction of two rivers

two trestle bridges hinged and splayed,

low houses crawling up the mountains.

Suppose she slashes her leg on a slashed pines tooth, ties the leg

in a kerchief

knocks on the door of a house, the first on the edge of town

has to beg water, won’t tell her family name, afraid someone will

know her family face

lies with her throbbing leg on the vined verandah where the woman

of the house

wanted her out of there, that was clear

yet with a stern and courteous patience leaned above her

with cold tea, water from the sweetest spring, mint from the same

source

later with rags wrung from a boiling kettle

and studying, staring eyes. Eyes ringed with watching. A peachtree

shedding yellowy leaves

and a houseful of men who keep off. So great a family of men, and

then this woman

who wanted her gone yet stayed by her, watched over her.

But this girl is expert in overhearing

and one word leaps off the windowpanes like the crack of dawn,

the translation of the babble of two rivers. What does this girl

with her little family quarrel, know about arsenals?

Everything she knows is wrapped up in her leg

without which she won’t get past Virginia, though she’s running

north.

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