Adrienne Rich

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—only the thumb is larger, longer—in these handsI could trust the world, or in many hands like these,
handling power-tools or steering-wheelor touching a human face… Such hands could turnthe unborn…

What Kind of Times Are
Adrienne
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows
uphilland the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadowsnear a meeting-house abandoned by the persecutedwho disappeared into those…

You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time,
and play a Chopin preludecalled by Cortot: "Delicious recollectionsfloat like perfume through the…

Sleeping, turning in turn like planetsrotating in their midnight meadow:
a touch is enough to let us knowwe’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:
the dream-ghosts of two worldswalking their ghost-towns, almost address each…

The rules break like a thermometer,
quicksilver spills across the charted systems,
we’re out in a country that has no languageno laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wrenthrough gorges unexplored since dawnwhatever we do together is pure…

Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earthone bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-oldcure for fever or melancholy a tonicfor living on this earth in the winters of this…

Wherever in this city, screens flickerwith pornography, with science-fiction vampires,
victimized hirelings bending to the lash,
we also have to walk…if simply as we walkthrough the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid crueltiesof our own…

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?--and yet, writing words like these,
I’m also living.
Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals

Rain on the West Side Highway,
red light at Riverside:
the more I love the more I thinktwo people together is a miracle.
You’re telling the story of your lifefor once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words.