Adrienne Rich - Cartographies of SIlence lyrics

A conversation begins with a lie and each

Speaker of the so-called
Common language feels
The ice-floe split, the drift apart

As if powerless, as if up against
A force of nature

A poem can begin with a lie and be torn up

A conversation has other laws
Recharges it'self with it's own

False energy, cannot be torn
Up infiltrates our blood repeats it'self

Inscribes with it's unreturning stylus
The isolation it denies

The classical music station
Playing hour upon hour in the apartment

The picking up and picking up
And again picking up the telephone

The syllables uttering
The old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar
Living in the formal network of the lie

Twisting the dials to drown the teror
Beneath the unsaid word

The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette

The blurring of terms silence not absence

Of words or music or even raw sounds

Silence can be a plan rigorously executed

The blueprint of a life

It is a presence it has a history, a form

Do not confuse it with any kind of absence

How calm, how inoffensive these words
Begin to seem to me

Though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract

Without wounding myself or you
There is enough pain here

This is why the classical of
The jazz music stations plays?
To give a ground of meaning to our pain?

The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer's Passion of Joan

Falconetti's face, hair shorn
A great geography
Mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry
Where this could happen
Not as blank space or as words

Stretched like skin over meaning of a
Night through which two people
Have talked till dawn

The scream of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear it'self, therefore
It asks it'self

How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them
This is useless to you and perhaps to others

It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-

Chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
Lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of poet the poem
Could turn into a thing

A granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
Alight with dew

If it could simply look you in the face
With naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

Til you, and I who long to make this thing
Were finally clarified together in it's stare

No let me have this dust
These pale clouds dourly lingering
These words

Moving with ferocious accuracy
Like the blind child's fingers

Or the new born infant's mouth
Violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago
Taken this method

Whether or bran pouring from
The loose-woven sack
Or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy
The pure annunciation to the eye

The visio beatifica
If from tie to time I long to turn

Like the Eleusinian hierophant
Holding up a single ear of grain

For the return to the
Concrete and everlasting world
What in fact I keep choosing

Are these words, these whispers
Conversations from which time after time the
Truth breaks moist and green