Adrienne Rich - Twenty-One Love Poems lyrics

I Whenever in this city, screens flicker with p**nography, with science-fiction vampires, victimized hirelings bending to the lash, we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties of our own neighborhoods. We need to grasp our lives inseparable from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces, and the red begonia perilously flashing from a tenement sill six stories high, or the long-legged young girls playing ball in the junior highschool playground. No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal pa**ion rooted in the city. II I 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. I know what I dreamed: our friend the poet comes into my room where I've been writing for days, drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere, and I want to show her one poem which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate, and wake. You've kissed my hair to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . . and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love, to move openly together in the pull of gravity, which is not simple, which carries the feathered gra** a long way down the upbreathing air. III Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young. Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty, my limbs streaming with a purer joy? did I lean from my window over the city listening for the future as I listen with nerves tuned for your ring? And you, you move towards me with the same tempo. Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark of the blue-eyed gra** of early summer the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring. At twenty, yes: we thought we'd live forever. At forty-five, I want to know even our limits. I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die. IV I come home from you through the early light of Spring flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado, the Discount Wares, the shoe-store. . . . I'm lugging my sack of groceries, I dash for the elevator where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed lets the door almost close on me. —For god's sake hold it! I croak at him. —Hysterical,— he breathes my way. I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles, make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone singing Here comes the sun. . . . I open the mail, drinking delicious coffee, delicious music, my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison: My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display they keep me constantly awake with the pain . . . Do whatever you can to survive. You know, I think men love wars . . . And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly, and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms. V This apartment full of books could crack open to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face the underside of everything you've loved— the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag even the best voices have had to mumble through, the silence burying unwanted children— women, deviants, witness—in desert sand. Kenneth tells me he's been arranging his books so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types; yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift loathing the women'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 absence of men who would not, women who could not, speak to our life—this still unexcavated hole called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world. VI Your small hands, precisely equal to my own— only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands I could trust the world, or in many hands like these, handling power-tools or steering-wheel or touching a human face. . . . Such hands could turn the unborn child rightways in the birth can*l or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship through icebergs, or piece together the fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup bearing on its sides figures of ecstatic women striding to the sibyl's den or the Eleusinian cave— such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence with such restraint, with such a grasp of the range and limits of violence that violence ever after would be obsolete. VII 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, that modulated cantata of the wild? or, when away from you I try to create you in words, am I simply using you, like a river or a war? And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all— not the crimes of others, not even our own d**h, but the failure to want our own freedom pa**ionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, ma**acres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves? VIII I can see myself years back at Sunion, hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes in woman's form, limping the long path, lying on a headland over the dark sea, looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl of white told me a wave had struck, imagining the pull of that water from that height, knowing deliberate suicide wasn't my métier, yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound. Well, that's finished. The woman who cherished her suffering is dead. I am her descendant. I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me, but I want to go on from here with you fighting the temptation to make a career of pain. IX Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live I 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 of us— a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart, a key. . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence, this inarticulate life. I'm waiting for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water for once, and show me what I can do for you, who have often made the unnameable nameable for others, even for me. X Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through our cries, our murmured dawn conspiracies our telephone calls. She knows—what can she know? If in my human arrogance I claim to read her eyes, I find there only my own animal thoughts: that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort, that voices of the psyche drive through the flesh further than the dense brain could have foretold, that the planetary nights are growing cold for those on the same journey, who want to touch one creature-traveler clear to the end; that without tenderness, we are in hell. XI 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, though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava. I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain smoking within like the sibyl stooped over her tripod, I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path, to feel you arteries glowing in my clasp, never failing to note the small, j**el-like flower unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her, that clings to the slowly altering rock— that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves, was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us. XII Sleeping, turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep: the dream-ghosts of two worlds walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other. I've wakened to your muttered words spoken light- or dark-years away, as if my own voice had spoken. But we have different voices, even in sleep, and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different and the past echoing through our bloodstreams is freighted with different language, different meanings— though in any chronicle of the world we share it could be written with new meaning we were two lovers of one gender, we were two women of one generation. XIII The rules break like a thermometer, quicksilver spills across the charted systems, we're out in a country that has no language no laws, we're chasing the raven and the wren through gorges unexplored since dawn whatever we do together is pure invention the maps they gave us were out of date by years . . . we're driving through the desert wondering if the water will hold out the hallucinations turn to simple villages the music on the radio comes clear— neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung but a woman's voice singing old songs with new words, with a quiet ba**, a flute plucked and fingered by women outside the law. XIV It was your vision of the pilot confirmed my vision of you: you said, He keeps on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose while we crouched in the open hatchway vomiting into plastic bags for three hours between St. Pierre and Miquelon. I never felt closer to you. In the close cabin where the honeymoon couples huddled in each other's laps and arms I put my hand on your thigh to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine, we stayed that way, suffering together in our bodies, as if all suffering were physical, we touched so in the presence of strangers who knew nothing and cared less vomiting their private pain as if all suffering were physical. (The Floating Poem, Unnumbered) Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine—tender, delicate your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond of the fiddlehead fern in forests just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come— the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there— the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth— your touch on me, firm, protective, searching me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers reaching where I had been waiting years for you in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is. XV If I lay on that beach with you white, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream and lying on that beach we could not stay because the wind drove fine sand against us as if it were against us if we tried to withstand it and we failed— if we drove to another place to sleep in each other's arms and the beds were narrow like prisoners' cots and we were tired and did not sleep together and this was what we found, so this is what we did— was the failure ours? If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end. XVI Across a city from you, I'm with you just as an August night moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep, the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight— or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin, G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder, falling asleep to the music of the sea. This island of Manhattan is wide enough for both of us, and narrow: I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face lies upturned, the halflight tracing your generous, delicate mouth where grief and laughter sleep together. XVII No one's fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we're not h**nes, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and d**h. 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 these are the forces we had ranged within us within us and against us, against us and within us. XVIII Rain on the West Side Highway, red light at Riverside: the more I live the more I think two people together is a miracle. You're telling the story of your life for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words. The story of our lives becomes our lives. Now you're in fugue across what some I'm sure Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea. Those are the words that come to mind. I feel estrangement, yes. As I've felt dawn pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light—? Close between grief and anger, a space opens where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder. XIX Can it be growing colder when I begin to touch myself again, adhesion pull away? When slowly the naked face turns from staring backward and looks into the present, the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and d**h and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living? Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream or in this poem, There are no miracles? (I told you from the first I wanted daily life, this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.) If I could let you know— two women together is a work nothing in civilization has made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine —look at the faces of those who have chosen it. XX That conversation we were always on the edge of having, runs on in my head, at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light polluted water yet reflecting even sometimes the moon and I discern a woman I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat and choking her like hair. And this is she with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head turning aside from pain, is dragging down deeper where it cannot hear me, and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul. XXI The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones of the great round rippled by stone implements the midsummer night light rising from beneath the horizon—where I said “a cleft of light” I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge simply nor any place but the mind casting back to where her solitude, shared, could be chosen without loneliness, not easily nor without pains to stake out the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light. I choose to be the figure in that light, half-blotted by darkness, something moving across that space, the color of stone greeting the moon, yet more than stone: a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle. 1974-1976