Adrienne Rich - Incipience lyrics

To live, to lie awake under scarred plaster
While ice is forming over the earth
At an hour when nothing can be done
To further any decision

To know the composing of the thread
Inside the spider's body
First atoms of the web visible tomorrow

To feel the fiery future
Of every matchstick in the kitchen

Nothing can be done
But by inches i write out my life
Hour by hour, word by word
Gazing into the anger of old women on the bus
Numbering the striations
Of air inside the ice cube
Imagining the existence of this poem
Our lives

A man is asleep in the next room
We are his dreams
We have the heads and breasts of women
The bodies of birds of prety
Sometimes we turn into silver serpents
While we sit up smoking and
Talking of how to live
He turns on the bed and murmurs

A man is asleep in the next room
A neurosurgeon enters his dream
And begins to dissect his brain
She does not look like a nurse
She is absorbed in her work she has a stern
Delicate face like Marie Curie she is not
Might be either of us

A man is asleep in the next room
He has spent a whole day
Standing, throwing stones into the black pool
Which keeps it's blackness
Outside the frame of his dream we
Are stumbling up the hill hand in hand
Stumbling and guiding each other
Over the scarred volcanic rock