Adrienne Rich

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put onthe body-armor of black rubberthe absurd flippersthe grave and awkward mask.

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…

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in

This is the grass your feet are planted on.
You paint it orange or you sing it green,
But you have never foundA way to make the grass mean what you mean.
A cloud can be whatever you intend:

Across a city from you,
I’m with you,
just as an August nightmoony, inlet-warm, seabathed,
I watched you sleep

Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happywith one piece of your heart.
Take what's still given: in a room's rich shadowa woman's breasts swinging…

Can it be growing colder when I beginto touch myself again, adhesions pull away?
When slowly the naked face turns from staring backwardand looks into the present,
the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and deathand the lips part and…

Every peak is a crater.
This is the law of volcanoes,
making them eternally and visibly female.
No height without depth, without a burning core

It was your vision of the pilotconfirmed my vision of you, you said.
He keeps on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose while we crouched in the open hatchwayvomiting into plastic bags.
For three hours between St.
Pierre and…

II wake up in your bed.
I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours.

She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime.

(The Floating Poem,
Unnumbered)Whatever happens with us, your bodywill haunt mine—tender, delicateyour lovemaking, like the half-curled frondof the fiddlehead fern in forestsjust washed by sun.
Your traveled, generous thighsbetween…

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stonesof the great round rippled by stone implementsthe midsummer night light rising form beneaththe horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”I meant this.
And this is not Stonehengesimply nor any place…

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things liveI want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both…

If I lay on that beach with youwhite, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Streamand lying on that beach we could not staybecause the wind drove fine sand against usas if it were against usif we tried to withstand it and we failed—if we…

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.
I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powersand those powers severely limitedby authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime…

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do timefor years of missing each other.
Yet only this odd warpin time tells me we’re not young.
Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,
my limbs streaming with a purer joy?

Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes throughour cries, our murmured dawn conspiraciesour telephone calls.
She knows—what can she know?
If in my human arrogance I claim to readher eyes,
I find there only my own animal…

VI come home from you through the early light of springflashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,
the Discount Wares, the shoe-store… I’m lugging my sackof groceries,
I dash for the elevatorwhere a man, taut, elderly, carefully…

II can see myself years back at Sunion,
hurting with an infected foot,
Philoctetesin woman’s form, limping the long path,
lying on a headland over the dark sea

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love.

That conversation we were always on the edge of having,
runs on in my head.
At night the Hudson tremblesin New Jersey light.
polluted water yet reflecting, even sometimes, the moonand I discern a woman I loved.

Our whole life a translationthe permissible fibsand now a knot of lieseating at itself to get
Words bitten thru words~~meanings burnt-off like paintunder the
All those dead lettersrendered into the oppressor's
Trying to tell the…