Читать книгу The Glass Constellation - Arthur Sze - Страница 52

Inmates put an acetylene torch to another inmate’s face,

seared out his eyes.

Others were tortured, lacerated with barbed wire,

knifed, clobbered with lead pipes.

I remember going to the state pen to see a performance of Beckett.

I see two inmates play Hamm and Clov.

Clov lifts weights all day,

his biceps are huge.

And Hamm, in a wheelchair with a bloody handkerchief,

dark purple shades,

is wheeled around and around

in a circle in the gym:

as guards watch, talk on walkie-talkies, slam doors,

as a television crew tapes segments.

I do not know whether these two inmates died or lived.

But they are now the parts they played:

locked in a scenario of bondage and desperate need,

needing each other to define themselves.

I tell myself to be open to all experience,

to take what is ugly and find something nourishing in it:

as penicillin may be found in green moldy bread,

or as, in the morning, a child of the earth

floating in a porcelain jar full of rainwater

is something astonishing.

But after the SWAT team has moved in and taken over

the flotsam and jetsam of a prison,

and the inmates are lined up and handcuffed to a chain-link fence,

I figure their chances, without people caring,

are “an ice cube’s chance in hell.”