Adrienne Rich - Behind the Motel lyrics

A man lies under a car half bare
A child plays bullfight with a torn cloth
Hemlocks grieve in wraps of mist
A woman talks on telephone, looks in a mirror
Fiddling with the metal pull of a drawer

She has seen her world wiped clean, the cloth
That wiped it disintegrate in mist
Or dying breath on the skin of a mirror
She has felt her life close like a drawer
Has awoken somewhere else, bare

He feels his skin as if it were mist
As if his face would show in no mirror
He needs some bolts he left
In a vanished drawer
Crawls out into the hemlocked
World with his bare
Hands, wipes his wrench on
An oil-soaked cloth

Stares at the woman talking into a mirror
Who has shut the phone into a drawer
While over and over with a torn cloth
At the edge of hemlocks behind the bare
Motel a child taunts a horned
Beast made from mist