Adrienne Rich - Rusted Legacy lyrics

Imagine a city where nothing’s
Forgiven your deed adheres
To you like a scar
A tattoo but almost everything’s
Forgotten deer flattened leaping a
Highway for food
The precise reason for the shaving
Of the confused girl’s head
The small boys’ punishing of the frogs
A city memory-starved but
Intent on retributions
Imagine the architecture the governance
The men and the women in power
Tell me if it is not true you still
Live in that city

Imagine a city partitioned divorced
From it's hills
Where temples and telescopes used to
Probe the stormy codices
A city brailling through fog
Thicket and twisted wire
Into dark’s velvet dialectic
Sewers which are also rivers
Art’s unchartered aquifers the springhead
Sprung open in civic gardens
Left unlocked at night
I finger the glass beads I strung and wore
Under the pines while the
Arrests were going on
(transfixed from neck to groin I wanted
To save what I could)
They brought trays with little
Glasses of cold water
Into the dark park a final village gesture
Before the villages were gutted
They were trying to save what they could
Tell me if this is not the same city

I have forced myself to come
Back like a daughter
Required to put her mother’s house in order
Whose hands need terrible gloves to handle
The medicinals the disease packed
In those linens
Accomplished criminal I’ve been but
Can I accomplish justice here? Tear
The old wedding sheet
Into cleaning rags? Faithless daughter
Like stone but with water pleating across
Let water be water let stone be stone
Tell me is this the same city

This I must she
Must she lie scabbed with rust
Crammed with memory in a place
Of little anecdotes no one left
To go around gathering the
Full dissident story?
Rusting her hands and shoulders
Stone her lips
Yet leaching down from her eyesockets tears
For one self only? each encysts a city