Adrienne Rich - Stepping Backward lyrics

Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow
Next year and when I'm fifty still good-by
This is the leave we never really take
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose
We see each other daily and in segments
Parting might make us meet anew, entire

You asked me once, and I
Could give no answer
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse
Official treacheries of face and name
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion
We might as well be truthful i should say
They're luckiest who know they're not unique
But only art or common interchange
Can teach that kindest truth and even art
Can only hint at what disturbed a Melville
Or calmed a Mahler's frenzy you and I
Still look from separate
Windows every morning
Upon the same white daylight in the square

And when we come into each other's rooms
Once in awhile, encumbered
And self-conscious
We hover awkwardly about the threshold
And usually regret the visit later
Perhaps the harshest fact is, only lovers -
And once in a while two with
The grace of lovers -
Unlearn that clumsiness of rare intrusion
And let each other freely come and go
Most of us shut too quickly into cupboards
The margin-scribbled books, the
Dried geranium
The penny horoscope, letters never mailed
The door may open, but the room is altered
Not the same room we look from night and day

It takes a late and slowly blooming wisdom
To learn that those we marked infallible
Are tragi-comic stumblers like ourselves
The knowledge breeds reserve we
Walk on tiptoe
Demanding more than we know how to render
Two-edged discovery hunts us finally down
The human act will make us real again
And then perhaps we come to know each other

Let us return to imperfection's school
No longer wandering after Plato's ghost
Seeking the garden where all
Fruit is flawless
We must at last renounce that ultimate blue
And take a walk in other kinds of weather
The sourest apple makes it's wry announcement
That imperfection has a certain tang
Maybe we shouldn't turn our pockets out
To the last crumb or lingering bit of fluff
But all we can confess of what we are
Has in it the defeat of isolation -
If not our own, then someone's, anyway

So I come back to saying this good-by
A sort of ceremony of my own
This stepping backward for another glance
Perhaps you'll say we need no ceremony
Because we know each other, crack and flaw
Like two irregular stones that fit together
Yet still good-by, because we live by inches
And only sometimes see the full dimension
Your stature's one I want to memorize -
Your whole level of being, to impose
On any other comers, man or woman
I'd ask them that they carry what they are
With your particular bearing, as you wear
The flaws that make you
Both yourself and human