Adrienne Rich - Cartographies of SIlence lyrics
[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
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