Adrienne Rich - Letters to a Young Poet lyrics

Your photograph won’t do you justice
Those wetted anthill mounds won’t
Let you focus that lens on the wetlands

Five swans chanting overhead
Distract your thirst for closure
And quick escape

Let me turn you around in
Your frozen nightgown and say
One word to you: Ineluctable
Meaning, you won’t get quit
Of this: the worst of the new news

History running back and forth
Panic in the labyrinth

I will not touch you further:
Your choice to freeze or not

To say, you and I are caught in
A laboratory without a science

Would it gladden you to think
Poetry could purely

Take it's place beneath lightning sheets
Or fogdrip live it's own life

Screamed at, howled down
By a torn bowel of dripping names

Composers visit Terezin, film makers Sarajevo
Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses

Ineluctable

If a woman as vivid as any artist
Can fling any day herself from the 14th floor

Would it relieve you to decide Poetry
Doesn’t make this happen?

From the edges of your own distraction turn
The cloth-weave up, it's undersea-fold venous

With sorrow’s wash and suck
Pull and release, annihilating rush

To and fro, fabric of caves
The onset of your fear
Kicking away their lush and
Slippery fauna nurseried in liquid glass

Trying to stand fast in
Rootsuck, in distraction
Trying to wade this
Undertow of utter repetition

Look: with all my fear I’m here with you
Trying what it
Means, to stand fast what it means to move

Beneaped rowboat, pirogue
Caught between the lowest
And highest tides of
Spring beneaped befallen
Becalmed, benighted, yes, begotten
Be infernal prefix of the actionless
Be as in Sit, Stand, Lie, Obey
The dog’s awful desire that takes his brain
And lays it at the boot heel

You can be like this forever Be
As without movement

But this is how
I come, anyway, pushing up from below
My head wrapped in a chequered scarf
A lanterned helmet on this head
Pushing up out of the ore
This sheeted face this lanterned head
Facing the seep of death
My lips having swum through silt
Clearly pronouncing hello and farewell

Who, anyway, wants to know
This pale mouth, this stick
Of crimson lipsalve Who my
Dragqueen’s vocal chords my bitter beat
My overshoulder backglance flung
At the great strophes and antistrophes
My chant my ululation my sacred parings
Nails, hair my dysentery my hilarious throat

My penal colony’s birdstarved ledge
My face downtown
In films by Sappho and Artaud?

Everyone for a moment

It’s not the déjà vu that kills
It’s the foreseeing
The head that speaks from the crater

I wanted to go somewhere
The brain had not yet gone
I wanted not to be there so alone