Adrienne Rich - Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law lyrics

You, once a belle in Shreveport
With henna-colored hair, skin
Like a peachbud
Still have your dresses copied
From that time, and play a Chopin prelude
Called by Cortot: "Delicious recollections
Float like perfume through the memory"

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake
Heavy with useless experience, rich
With suspicion, rumor, fantasy
Crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
Of mere fact in the prime of your life

Nervy, glowering, your daughter
Wipes the teaspoons, grows another way

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink
She hears the angels chiding, and looks out
Past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky
Only a week since They said: Have no patience



The next time it was: Be insatiable
Then: Save yourself others you cannot save
Sometimes she's let the tapstream
Scald her arm
A match burn to her thumbnail

Or held her hand above the kettle's snout
Right inthe woolly steam they
Are probably angels
Since nothing hurts her anymore, except
Each morning's grit blowing into her eyes

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters
The beak that grips her
She becomes and Nature
That sprung-lidded, still commodious
Steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
Gets stuffed with it all:
The mildewed orange-flowers
The female pills, the terrible breasts
Of Boadicea beneath flat foxes'
Heads and orchids
Two handsome women, gripped in argument
Each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream
Across the cut glass and majolica
Like Furies cornered from their prey:
The argument ad feminam, all the old knives
That have rusted in my back
I drive in yours, ma semblable, ma soeur!

Knowing themselves too well in one another:
Their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn
The prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn
Reading while waiting for the iron to heat
Writing, My Life had stood -a Loaded Gun -
In that Amherst pantry while the
Jellies boil and scum, or, more often
Iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird
Dusting everything on the whatnot
Every day of life

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens
She shaves her legs until they gleam
Like petrified mammoth tusk

When to her lute Corinna sings
Neither words nor music are her own
Only the long hair dipping
Over her cheek, only the song
Of silk against her knees and these
Adjusted in reflections of an eye

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before
An unlocked door, that cage of cages
Tell us, you bird, you tragical machine -
Is this fertillisante douleur? Pinned down
By love, for you the only natural action
Are you edged more keen
To prise the secrets of the
Vault? has Nature shown
Her household books to you, daughter-in law
That her sons never saw?

"To have in this uncertain world some stay
Which cannot be undermined, is
Of the utmost consequence" thus wrote
A woman, partly brave and partly good
Who fought with what she partly understood
Few men about her would or could do more
Hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore

"You all die at fifteen, " said Diderot
And turn part legend, part convention
Still, eyes inaccurately dream
Behind closed windows blankening with steam
Deliciously, all that we might have been
All that we were -fire, tears
Wit, taste, martyred ambition -
Stirs like the memory of refused adultery
The drained and flagging bosom
Of our middle years

Not that it is done well, but
That it is done at all? Yes, think
Of the odds! or shrug them off forever
This luxury of the precocious child
Time's precious chronic invalid, -
Would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
Mere talent was enough for us -
Glitter in fragments and rough drafts

Sigh no more, ladies time is male
And in his cups drinks to the fair
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
Our mediocrities over-praised
Indolence read as abnegation
Slattern thought styled intuition
Every lapse forgiven, our crime
Only to cast too bold a shadow
Or smash the mold straight off
For that, solitary confinement
Tear gas, attrition shelling
Few applicants for that honor

Well
She's long about her coming, who must be
More merciless to herself than history
Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge
Breasted and glancing through the currents
Taking the light upon her
At least as beautiful as any boy
Or helicopter, poised, still coming
Her fine blades making the air wince

But her cargo no promise then:
Delivered palpable
Ours