Adrienne Rich - Ancipience lyrics

1. To live, to lie awake under scarred plaster while ice is forming over the earth at an hour when nothing can be done to further any decision to know the composing of the thread inside the spider's body first atoms of the web visible tomorrow to feel the fiery future of every matchstick in the kitchen Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word gazing into the anger of old women on the bus numbering the striations of air inside the ice cube imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives 2. A man is asleep in the next room We are his dreams We have the heads and breasts of women the bodies of birds of prey Sometimes we turn into silver serpents While we sit up smoking and talking of how to live he turns on the bed and murmurs A man is asleep in the next room A neurosurgeon enters his dream and begins to dissect his brain She does not look like a nurse she is absorbed in her work she has a stern, delicate face like Marie Curie She is not/might be either of usAn early or initial stage: the point of beginning to exist or appear. A man is asleep in the next room He has spent a whole day standing, throwing stones into the black pool which keeps its blackness Outside the frame of his dream we are stumbling up the hill hand in hand, stumbling and guiding each other over the scarred volcanic rock