Adrienne Rich - Splittings lyrics

My body opens over San
Francisco like the day-
Light raining down each pore crying
The change of light i am not with her I have
Been waking off an on
All night to that pain not simply absence
But the presence of the past destructive
To living here and now Yet
If I could instruct
Myself, if we could learn to learn from pain
Even as it grasps us if the mind
Themind that lives
In this body could reguse to
Let it'self be crushed
In that grasp it would loosen Pain
Would have to stand of
From me and listen it's dark
Breath still on me
But the mind could begin to speak to pain
And pain would have to answer:

We are older now
We have met before these are
My hands before your eyes
My figure blotting out all that is not mine
I am the pain of
Division creator of divisions
It is I who blot your lover from you
And not the time-zones nor the miles
It is not separations calls me forth but I
Who am separation And remember
I have no existence apart from you

I believe I am choosing something new
Not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the
Body of the mother
And create her in absence? or simply cry
Primordial loneliness? does the bed
Of the stream
Once diverted mourning remember wetness?

But we
We live so much in these configurations
Of the past I choose
To separate her from my past
We have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
To detect primordial pain as
It stalks toward me
Flashing it's bleak torch in
My eyes blotting out
Her particular being the details of her love
I will not be divided from her or from myself
By myths of separation
While her mind and body in
Manhattan are more with me
Than the smell of eucalyptus coolly
Burning on these hills

The world tells me I am it's creature
I am raked by eyes brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her
For refuge lay my head
In the space between her breast and shoulder
Abnegating power for love
As woman have done or hiding
From power in her love like a man
I refuse these givens the splitting
Between love and action I am choosing
Not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to live this time for once
With all my intelligence