Adrienne Rich - Tendril lyrics
[Adrienne Rich - Tendril lyrics]
Why does the outstretched finger of home
Probe the dark hotel room
Like a flashlight beam
On the traveller, half packed
Sitting on the bed face in hands
Wishing her bag emptied again at home
Why does the young security guard
Pray to keep standing watch forever
Never to fly
Why does he wish he were boarding
As the passengers file past
Him into the plane
What are they carrying in their bundles
What vanities, superstitions
Little talismans
What have the authorities intercepted
Who will get to keep it
Half-asleep in the dimmed cabin
She configures a gecko
Aslant the overhead bin tendrils of vine
Curling up through the cabin floor
Buried here in night as in a valley
Remote from rescue
Unfound, confounded, vain, superstitious
Whatever we were before
Now we are still, outstretched, curled
However we were
Unwatched the gecko, the inching of green
Through the cracks in the
Fused imperious shell
Dreaming a womb’s languor volleyed in death
Among fellow strangers
She has merely slept through the night
A nose nearby rasps
Everyone in fact is breathing
The gecko has dashed into some crevice
Of her brain, the tendrils retract
Orange juice is passed on trays
Declarations filled out in the sudden dawn
She can’t go on dreaming of mass death
This was not to have been her métier
She says to the mirror in the toilet
A bad light any way you judge yourself
And she’s judge, prosecutor, witness
Perpetrator of her time
‘s conspiracies of the ignorant
With the ruthless She’s the
One she’s looking at
This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic
And besides she’s not confessing
Her mind balks craving wild onions
Nostril chill of eucalyptus
That seventh sense of what’s missing
Against what’s supplied
She walks at thirty thousand
Feet into the cabin
Sunrise crashing through the windows
Cut the harping she tells herself
You’re human, porous like all the rest
She was to have sat in a vaulted
Library heavy scrolls wheeled to a desk
For sieving, sifting, translating
All morning then a quick lunch thick coffee
Then light descending slowly
On earthen-colored texts
But that’s a dream of dust
Frail are thy tents humanity
Facing thy monologues of force
She must have fallen asleep reading
She must have fallen asleep reading
The woman who mopped the tiles
Is deliquescent a scarlet gel
Her ligaments and lungs
Her wrought brain her belly’s pulse
Disrupt among others mangled there
The chief librarian the beggar
The man with the list of questions
The scrolls never to be translated
And the man who wheeled the scrolls
She had wanted to find meaning in
The past but the future drove
A vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer
Rearranging the past in a blip
Coherence smashed into vestige
Not for her even the thought
Of her children’s children picking up
One shard of tile then another laying
Blue against green seeing words
In three scripts flowing through
Vines and flowers guessing at what it was
The Levantine debris
Not for her but still for someone?
Probe the dark hotel room
Like a flashlight beam
On the traveller, half packed
Sitting on the bed face in hands
Wishing her bag emptied again at home
Why does the young security guard
Pray to keep standing watch forever
Never to fly
Why does he wish he were boarding
As the passengers file past
Him into the plane
What are they carrying in their bundles
What vanities, superstitions
Little talismans
What have the authorities intercepted
Who will get to keep it
Half-asleep in the dimmed cabin
She configures a gecko
Aslant the overhead bin tendrils of vine
Curling up through the cabin floor
Buried here in night as in a valley
Remote from rescue
Unfound, confounded, vain, superstitious
Whatever we were before
Now we are still, outstretched, curled
However we were
Unwatched the gecko, the inching of green
Through the cracks in the
Fused imperious shell
Dreaming a womb’s languor volleyed in death
Among fellow strangers
She has merely slept through the night
A nose nearby rasps
Everyone in fact is breathing
The gecko has dashed into some crevice
Of her brain, the tendrils retract
Orange juice is passed on trays
Declarations filled out in the sudden dawn
She can’t go on dreaming of mass death
This was not to have been her métier
She says to the mirror in the toilet
A bad light any way you judge yourself
And she’s judge, prosecutor, witness
Perpetrator of her time
‘s conspiracies of the ignorant
With the ruthless She’s the
One she’s looking at
This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic
And besides she’s not confessing
Her mind balks craving wild onions
Nostril chill of eucalyptus
That seventh sense of what’s missing
Against what’s supplied
She walks at thirty thousand
Feet into the cabin
Sunrise crashing through the windows
Cut the harping she tells herself
You’re human, porous like all the rest
She was to have sat in a vaulted
Library heavy scrolls wheeled to a desk
For sieving, sifting, translating
All morning then a quick lunch thick coffee
Then light descending slowly
On earthen-colored texts
But that’s a dream of dust
Frail are thy tents humanity
Facing thy monologues of force
She must have fallen asleep reading
She must have fallen asleep reading
The woman who mopped the tiles
Is deliquescent a scarlet gel
Her ligaments and lungs
Her wrought brain her belly’s pulse
Disrupt among others mangled there
The chief librarian the beggar
The man with the list of questions
The scrolls never to be translated
And the man who wheeled the scrolls
She had wanted to find meaning in
The past but the future drove
A vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer
Rearranging the past in a blip
Coherence smashed into vestige
Not for her even the thought
Of her children’s children picking up
One shard of tile then another laying
Blue against green seeing words
In three scripts flowing through
Vines and flowers guessing at what it was
The Levantine debris
Not for her but still for someone?