- A white woman dreaming of innocence,
- of a country childhood, apple-blossom driftings,
- is held in a DC-10 above the purity
- of a thick cloud ceiling in a vault of purest blue.
- She feels safe. Here, no one can reach her.
- Neither men nor women have her in their power.
- Because I have sometimes been her, because I am of her,
- I watch her with eyes that blink away like a flash
- cruelly, when she does what I don't want to see.
- I am tired of innocence and its uselessness,
- sometimes the dream of innocence beguiles me.
- Nothing has told me how to think of her power.
- Blurredly, apple-blossom drifts
- across rough earth, small trees contort and twist
- making their own shapes, wild. Why should we love purity?
- Can the woman in the DC-10 see this
- and would she call this innocence? If no one can reach her
- she is drawing on unnamed, unaccountable power.
- This woman I have been and recognize
- must know that beneath the quilt of whiteness lies
- a hated nation, here ,
- earth whose wet places call to mind
- still-open wounds: her country.
- Do we love purity? Where do we turn for power?
- Knowing us as I do I cringe when she says
- But I was not culpable,
- I was the victim, the girl, the youngest,
- the susceptible one, I was sick,
- the one who simply had to get out, and did
- : I am still trying how to think of her power.
- And if she was forced, this woman, by the same
- white Dixie boy who took for granted as prey
- her ignored dark sisters? What if at five years old
- she was old to his fingers splaying her vulva open
- what if forever after, in every record
- she wants her name inscribed as innocent
- and will not speak, refuses to know, can say
- I have been numb for years
- does not want to hear of any violation
- like or unlike her own, as if the victim
- can be innocent only in isolation
- as if the victim dare not be intelligent
- (I have been numb for years): and if this woman
- longs for an intact soul,
- longs for what we all long for, yet denies us all?
- What has she smelled of power without once
- tasting it in the mouth? For what protections
- has she traded her wildness and the lives of others?
- There is a porch in Salem, Virginia
- that I have never seen, that may no longer stand,
- honeysuckle vines twisting above the talk,
- a driveway full of wheeltracks, paths going down
- to the orchard, apple and peach,
- divisions so deep a wild child lost her way.
- A child climbing an apple-tree in Virginia
- refuses to come down, at last comes down
- for a neighbor's lying bribe. Now, if that child, grown old
- feels safe in a DC-10 above thick white clouds
- and no one can reach her
- and if that woman's child, another woman
- chooses another way, yet finds the old vines
- twisting across her path, the old wheeltracks
- how does she stop dreaming the dream
- of protection, how does she follow her own wildness
- shedding the innocence, the childish power?
- How does she keep from dreaming the old dreams?