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Poems Find and share the perfect poems. The Art of Translation audio only Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem. Adrienne Rich 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.
Your traveled, generous thighs between which my whole face has come and come - the innocence and wisdom of the placee 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 screendoors 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 of 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 heroines, 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 death. No prison 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 we had ranged within us within us and against us, against us and within us.
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 estarnging 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? 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. Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom. My babies together One of my tattoos! Poems Find and share the perfect poems. The Art of Translation audio only Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem. Adrienne Rich Tonight No Poetry Will Serve Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence The Burning of Paper Instead of Children audio only Click the icon above to listen to this audio poem.
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