The subway
hurtling to Brooklyn
her head on her knees
asleep or drugged
many sleep
the whole way
others sit
staring holes of fire into the air
others plan rebellion:
night after night
awake in prison, my mind
licked at the mattress like a flame
till the cellblock went up roaring
-Adrienne Rich
We have, as they say
certain things in common.
I mean: a view
from a bathroom window
over slate to stiff pigeons
huddled every morning; the way
water tastes from out tap
which you marvel at, letting
it splash into the glass.
Because of you I notice
the taste of water,
a luxury I might
otherwise have missed.
-Adrienne Rich
It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know beforehand, everything I need to tell you.
Adrienne Rich
Your lips steady never say
It should have been this way
That’s not what you say
You so carefully asking, why?
Your eyes looking straight into mine
remind me of a woman’s auburn hair my mothers hair
but you never saw that hair
Adrienne Rich
“Death of the city Her face
sleeping Her quick stride Her
unning Search for a private space The city
caving from within The lessons badly
learned Or not at all The unbuilt world
This one love flowing Touching other
lives Spilt love The least wall caving”
“The world tells me I am it’s creature / I am raked by eyes brushed by hands / I want to crawl into her for refuge. Lay my head / In the space / between her breast and shoulder, abnegating power for love / as women have done / or hiding / from power in her love / like a man. I refuse these givens / the splitting / between love and action. I am choosing not to suffer uselessly / and not to use her. I choose to love / this time / for once / with all of my intelligence.” 1974
XVII
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, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance.
Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and theses are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.
Adrienne Rich
When it’s finished and we’re lying
in a stubble of blistered flowers
eyes gaping, mouths staring
dusted with crushed arterial blues
I’ll have done nothing
even for you?
Adrienne Rich
