ZOMBIE

--Lavinia Greenlaw (The New Yorker, April 7, 2003)

1980, I returned to the city exposed
in black and white as the lights went out and on.
A black-alley neon sign, the first I'd seen,
drew us sweetly down and in to brightness:
a doll's parasol, a spike of green cherries,
the physics of apricot brandy, actual limes
and morning-to-night shades of rum.
Newly old enough and government moneyed,
we knocked them back, melting the ice
between us and the unaccustomed looseness
of being legitimate and free. What possessed us?
Was it the kick of spirits or the invisible syrup
in which they swam that worked in our veins,
charming us into a car and forty miles east

to the fields of our years of boredom...
Did we not remember the curse of this place?
How Sundays drank our blood as we watched
dry paint or the dust on the television screen.
How people died bursting out of a quiet life,
or from being written into a small world's stories.
Who can see such things and live to tell?
How we hunted all night for noise and love,
striking out once across ploughed and frozen earth,
lurching from rut to rut until at the edge
we smashed our way out through a headge, to fall
eight feet to the road. Of course, we felt nothing.
Was it not ourselves who frightened us most?
As if brightness or sweetness could save us.