Adrienne Rich - A Long Conversation lyrics

Warm bloom of blood in
The child's arterial tree
Could you forget? do you remember? not to
Know you were cold? Altercations
From the porches color still
High in your cheeks the leap for the catch
The game getting wilder as the lights come on
Catching your death it was said
Your death of cold
Something you couldn't see ahead
You couldn't see (energy: Eternal Delight)

A long conversation
Between persistence and impatience
Between the bench of forced confessions
Hip from groin swiveled apart
Young tongues torn in the webbing
The order of the cities founded on disorder
And intimate resistance
Desire exposed and shameless
As the flags go by



Sometimes looking backward
Into this future, straining
Neck and eyes I'll meet your shadow
With it's enormous eyes
You who will want to know
What this was all about
Maybe this is the beginning of madness
Maybe it's your conscience
As you, straining neck and eyes
Gaze forward into this past:
What did it mean to you?
To receive "full human rights"
Or the blue aperture of hope?

Mrs bartender, will you tell us dear
Who came in when the nights were
Cold and drear and who sat where
Well helmeted and who
Was showing off his greasy hair
Mrs bartender tell me quickly
Who spoke thickly or not at all
How you decided what you'd abide
What was proud and thus allowed
How you knew what to do
With all the city threw at you
Mrs bartender tell me true
We've been keeping an eye on you
And this could be a long conversation
We could have a long accommodation

On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the
Motel room of a certain time and country, a
White plastic saucer of cheese
And hard salami, winter
Radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread
A bottle of red
Wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable
Someone has brought pills
For the infection that is
Ransacking this region someone
Else came to clean birds
Salvaged from the oil
Spill here we eat, drink from thick tumblers
Try to pierce this thicket with mere words
Like a little cell let's
Not aggrandize ourselves
We are not a little cell
But we are like a little cell

Music arrives, searching for us what hope
Or memory without it
Whatever we may think after so many words

A long conversation
Pierced, jammed, scratched out:
Bans, preventative detention, broken mouths
And on the scarred bench sequestered
A human creature with bloody wings
It's private parts reamed
Still trying to speak

A hundred and fifty years in
1848, a pamphlet was published
One of many but the longest-read one chapter
In the long book of memories and
Expectations a chapter described to us as
Evil if not evil, out-of date
Naïve and mildewed even the book they
Say is out of print, lacking popular demand
So we have to find out
What in fact that manifesto
Said evil we can judge mildew
Doesn't worry us we
Don't want to be more naïve
Or out-of date than necessary
Some old books are probably
More useful than others
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without
Constantly revolutionizing the instruments
Of production, thereby the
Relations of production
And with them the whole
Relations of societyit
Creates a world after it's own image
In proportion as the bourgeoisie
Ie, capital, is developed
In the same proportion is the proletariat
The modern working class developed–a class
Of laborers who live
Only so long as they find work, and who find
Work only so long as
Their labor increases capital
These laborers, who must
Sell themselves piecemeal, are a
Commodity, like every other
Article of commerce, and are
Consequently exposed to all the
Vicissitudes of competition
To all the fluctuations of the market
–Can we say if or how we find
This true in our lives today?
She stands before us as if we
Are a class, in school, but we are long out
Of school still, there's that way she has
Of holding the book in her hands
As if she knew it contained
The answer to her question
Someone: –Technology's changing the
Most ordinary forms
Of human contact–who can't see that
In their own life?
–But technology is nothing but a means
–Someone, i say, makes a killing off war
You: –I've been telling
You, that's the engine driving the
Free market not information
Militarization arsenals spawning wealth
Another woman: –But surely then patriarchal
Nationalism is the key?
He comes in late, as usual he's
Been listening to sounds outside
The tide scarping the
Stones, the voices in nearby cottages
The way he used to listen at the beach
As a child he doesn't speak like a
Teacher, more like a journalist
Come back from war
To report to us –It isn't nations anymore
Look at
The civil wars in all the cities is their a
Proletariat that can act effectively
On this collusion, between the state and the
Armed and murderous splinter
Groups roaming at large? How could all these
Private arsenals exist without the
Export of increasingly
Sophisticated arms approved by
The metropolitan bourgeoisie?
Now someone gets up and leaves
Cloud-faced: -I can't stand that kind of
Language i still care about poetry
All kinds of language fly into
Poetry, like it or not
Or even if you're only as we were trying
To keep an eye on the weapons on the street
And under the street
Just here, our friend L:
Bony, nerve-driven, closeted
Working as a nurse when he can't
Get teaching jobs jew from a dynasty of
Converts, philosopher trained as an engineer
He can't fit in where
His brilliant and privileged
Childhood pointed him he too is losing
Patience: What is the use
Of studying philosophy
If all that it does is enable you
To talk with some plausibility about
Some abstruse questions of logic etc
And if it does not
Improve your thinking about the important
Questions of everyday life
If it does not make you more
Conscientious than any journalist in the
Use of the dangerous phrases such people
Use for their own ends?
You see, I know that it's difficult
To think well about "certainty
" "probability, " perception, etc but
It is, if possible, still more difficult
To think, or try to think
Really honestly about your life and
Other people's lives and thinking about
These things is NOT THRILLING
But often downright nasty and when it's
Nasty then it's MOST important
His high-pitched voice with it's
Darker hoarser undertone
At least he didn't walk out, he stayed
Long fingers drumming

So now your pale dark face thrown up
Into pre rain silver light
Your white shirt takes
On the hurl and flutter of gulls' wings
Over your dark leggings their leathery legs
Flash past your hurling arm one hand
Snatching crusts from the bowl
Another hand holds close
You, barefoot on that narrow strand
With the iceplant edges and
The long spindly pier
You just as the rain starts
Leaping into the bay in your cloud of black
Bronze and silvering hair
Later by the window on
A fast-gathering winter evening
My eyes on the page then catch
Your face your breasts that light

Small tradespeople
Shopkeepers, retired tradesmen
Handicraftsmen and peasants–
All these sink gradually into the proletariat
Partly because their
Diminutive capital does not suffice for
The scale on which
Modern industry is carried on
And is swamped in the
Competition with the large capitalists
Partly because their specialized
Skill is rendered worthless by
New methods of production
Thus, the proletariat is recruited
From all classes of the population

Pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay
The last gash of light
Abruptly bandaged in darkness

1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth: I wish
You would write a poem
Addressed to those who, in consequence
Of the complete failure of
The French Revolution
Have thrown up all hopes
Of the amelioration of mankind
And are sinking into an almost epicurean
Selfishness, disguising the same
Under the soft titles of domestic attachment
And contempt for visionary philosophes
A generation later
Revolutions scorching Europe:
The visionaries having survived despite
Rumors of complete failure
The words have barely begun
To match the desire
When the cold fog blows back in
Organized and disordering
Muffling words and faces
Your lashes, visionary! screening
In sudden rushes this
Shocked, abraded crystal

I can imagine a sentence that might
Someday end with the word
Love like the one written by that
Asthmatic young man, which begins
At the risk of
Appearing ridiculousit would have to
Contain loses, resiliences
Histories faced it would have
To contain a face–his yours hers
Mine–by which I could
Do well, embracing it like water in my hands
Because by then we could be sure that
"doing well" by one
Or some, was immiserating nobody:
A true sentence, then
For greeting the newborn
(–someplace else in our hopes)

But where ordinary collective affections
Carry a price
(Swamped, or accounted worthless) I'm
One of those driven
Seabirds stamping oil-distempered
Waters maimed "by natural causes"
The music pirated from somewhere
Else: Catalan songs reaching
Us after fifty years old nuevos conciones
After twenty years? In
Them, something about the sweetness of life
The memory of
Traditions of mercy, struggles for
Justice a long throat
Casting memory forward

"it's the layers of history
We have to choose, along
With our own practice: what
Must be tried again over and over and
What must not be repeated
And at what depths which layer
Will meet others" the words barely begin
To match the desire
And the mouth crammed with
Dollars doesn't testify

The eye has become a human eye
When it's object has become a human
Social object

Brecht becomes german icon anew
Forgiven marxist ideas

The Arts, you know–they're
Jews, they're left-wing
In other words, stay away

So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true
How you still do what you do
Your old theories forgiven
–the public understands
It was one thing then but now is now
And everyone says your lungs are bad
And your liver very sad
And the force of your imagination
Has no present destination
Though subversive has a certain charm
And art can really do no harm
But still they say you get up and go
Every morning to the studio
Is it still a thrill? Or an act of will?
Mr kunstelaar

–After so long to be asked an opinion
Most of that time opinion's unwelcome
But opinion anyway was never art along the
Way I was dropped by some
Others could say I had dropped
Them i tried to
Make in my studio what I could not
Make outside it to even have a studio
Or a separate room to sleep in was
A point in fact in case you missed
The point: I come
From hard-carriers, lint-pickers
People who hauled cables
Through half-dug tunnels
Their bodies created the possibility
Of my existence i
Come from the kind of family where loss
Means not just grief but
Utter ruin–Adults and
Children forced into prostitution
Orphanages, juvenile prisons
Emigration–never to meet
Again i wanted to show those
Lives designated insignificant as beauty
Terror they were significant to me and
What they had endured terrified
Me i knew such
A life could have been my own
I also knew they had saved me from it

I tried to show all this
And as well to make an art
As impersonal as it demanded

I have no theories I don't know what I
Am being forgiven i am my art
I make it from my body and the
Bodies that produced mine i am
Still trying to find the pictorial language
For this anger and fear rotating
On an axle of love if I get up and go to the
Studio–it's there I find the company I
Need to go on working

"This is for you this little song
Without much style because your smile
Fell like a red leaf through my tears
In those fogbound years when without ado
You gave me a bundle of fuel to burn
When my body was utterly cold
This is for you who would not applaud
When with a kick to the breast or groin
They dragged us into the van
When flushed faces cheered at our disgrace
Or looked away this is for you who stayed
To see us through
Delivered our bail and disappeared
This little song without much style
May it find you somewhere well"
In the dark windowglass a blurred face
Is it still mine?
Who out there hoped to change me–
What out there has tried?
What sways and presses against the pane
What can't I see beyond or through–
Charred, crumpled
Ever-changing human language
Is that still you?