These are from
Twenty-One Love Poems (A Dream of a Common Language. Poems: 1974-79) by Adrienne Rich
I
Wherever in this city, screens flicker
with pornography, 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 blunt 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 high school playground.
No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulphuric air,
dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,
our animal passions rooted in the city.
II
I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm clock 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.
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 together, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.
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 sideways in the birth canal
or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship
through ice-bergs, or piece together
the fine, needle-like shreds 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 could carry out an unavoidable violence
with such restraint, with such a grasp
of the range and limit of violence
that violence ever after would be obsolete.
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 others 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.
And because I am not suggesting an actual poem for inclusion into the anthology, just offering the reading of a few poems, I'm going to be cheeky and put in this aural link to another poet.
Jackie Kay reading some of her poems
