This apartment full of books could crack opento the thick jaws, the bulging eyesof monsters, easily:
Once open the books, you have to facethe underside of everything you’ve loved—the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gageven the best voices have had to mumble through,the silence burying unwanted children—women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his booksso he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;yes; and we still have to reckon with Swiftloathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers,
Claudel vilifying Gide,and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries—of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;and we still have to stare into the absenceof men who would not, women who could not, speakto our life—this still unexcavated holecalled civilization, this act of translation, this half-world. This is poem V, from Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems collection, written between 1974-1976. These were originally published as a complete collection but were later re-published and included as part of another collection of works, written between 1974-1977, called The Dream Of A Common Language.
Twenty-One Love Poems and The Floating Poem, (un-numbered) can all be found here at oldpoetry.
