Adrienne Rich - In Plain Sight lyrics

My neighbor moving in a doorframe moment’s
Reach of her hand then

Withdrawn As from some old guilty pleasure

Smile etched like a scar which must be borne
Smile
In a photograph taken against one’s will

Her son up on a ladder stringing
Along the gutter
Electric icicles in a temperate zone

If the suffering hidden in plain sight
Is of her past her future
Or the thin-ice present where
We’re balancing here or how she sees it
I can’t presume

Ice-thin cold and precarious
The land I live in and
Have argued not to leave
Cold on the verge of crease
Crack without notice

Ice-green disjuncture treasoning us
To flounder cursing each other
Cold and grotesque the sex
The grimaces the grab

A privilege you say to live here A luxury
Everyone still wants to come here!
You want a Christmas card, a greeting
To tide us over
With pictures of the children

Then you demand a valentine
An easterlily anything for the grab
A mothersday menu wedding invitation

It’s not as in a museum that I observe
And mark in every Face I meet

Under crazed surfaces
Traces of feeling locked in shadow

Not as in a museum of history
Do I pace here nor as one who in a show
Of bland paintings shrugs and walks on I gaze
Through faces not as an X ray nor

As paparazzo shooting
The compromised celebrity

Nor archaeologist filming the looted site
Nor as the lover tearing out of it's frame
The snapshot to be held to a flame

But as if a mirror forced to reflect a room
The figures

Standing the figures crouching