Adrienne Rich - Twenty-One Love Poems lyrics

Whenever in this city, screens flicker
With pornography, with
Science-fiction vampires
Victimized hirelings bending to the lash
We also have to walk if simply as we walk
Through the rainsoaked garbage
The tabloid cruelties
Of our own neighborhoods
We need to grasp our lives inseparable
From those rancid dreams, that blurt
Of metal, those disgraces
And the red begonia perilously flashing
From a tenement sill six stories high
Or the long legged young girls playing ball
In the junior highschool playground
No one has imagined us we
Want to live like trees
Sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air
Dappled with scars, still
Exuberantly budding
Our animal passion rooted in the city



I wake up in your bed i
Know I have been dreaming
Much earlier, the alarm broke
Us from each other
You’ve been at your desk for hours
I know what I dreamed:
Our friend the poet comes into my room
Where I’ve been writing for days
Drafts, carbons, poems are
Scattered everywhere
And I want to show her one poem
Which is the poem of my life but, I hesitate
And wake you’ve kissed my hair
To wake me i dreamed you were a poem
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone
And I laugh and fall dreaming again
Of the desire to show you to everyone I love
To move openly together
In the pull of gravity, which is not simple
Which carries the feathered grass a long
Way down the upbreathing air

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
For years of missing each other
Yet only this odd warp
In time tells me we’re not young
Did I ever walk the
Morning streets at twenty
My limbs streaming with a purer joy?
Did I lean from my window over the city
Listening for the future
As I listen with nerves tuned for your ring?
And you
You move towards me with the same tempo
Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark
Of the blue-eyed grass of early summer
The green-blue wild cress washed
By the spring
At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever
At forty-five
I want to know even our limit's
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow
And somehow, each of us will
Help the other live, and somewhere
Each of us must help the other die

I come home from you through
The early light of Spring
Flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado
The Discount Wares
The shoe-store i’m lugging my sack
Of groceries, I dash for the elevator
Where a man, taut, elderly
Carefully composed
Let's the door almost close on me
For god’s sake hold it!
I croak at him Hysterical, he breathes my way
I let myself into the
Kitchen, unload my bundles
Make coffee, open the window
Put on Nina Simone
Singing Here comes the sun i open the mail
Drinking delicious coffee, delicious music
My body still both light and
Heavy with you the mail
Let's fall a Xerox of something
Written by a man
Aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:
My genitals have been the object
Of such a sadistic display
They keep me constantly awake with the pain
Do whatever you can to survive
You know, I think men love wars
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
Break open further with tears
I am crying helplessly
And they still control the world
And you are not in my arms

This apartment full of books could crack open
To the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
Of monsters, easily: Once open the books
You have to face
The underside of everything you’ve loved
The rack and pincers held in readiness
The gag even the best voices have
Had to mumble through
The silence burying unwanted children
Women, deviants, witness in desert sand
Kenneth tells me he’s been
Arranging his books so he can look at Blake
And Kafka while he types
Yes and we still have to reckon with Swift
Loathing the women’s flesh while
Praising her mind
Goethe’s dread of the mothers
Claudel vilifying Gide
And the ghosts their hands
Clasped for centuries
Of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women
Charred at the stake
Centuries of books unwritten piled
Behind these shelves
And we still have to stare into absence
Of men who would not, women who could not
Speak
To our life this still unexcavated hole
Called civilization, this act of translation
This half-world

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own
Only the thumb is larger
Longer in these hands
I could trust the world, or
In many hands like these
Handling power-tools or steering-wheel
Or touching a human face
Such hands could turn
The unborn child rightways in the birth canal
Or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship
Through icebergs, or piece together
The fine
Needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup
Bearing on it's sides
Figures of ecstatic women striding
To the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave
Such hands might carry out
An unavoidable violence
With such restraint, with such a grasp
Of the range and limit's of violence
That violence ever after would be obsolete

What kind of beast would turn
It's life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
And yet, writing words like these
I'm also living is all this close to
The wolverines’ howled signals
That modulated cantata of the wild?
Or, when away from you I try
To create you in words
Am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers
How have I used wars
To escape writing of the worst thing of all
Not the crimes of others, not
Even our own death
But the failure to want our
Own freedom passionately enough
So that blighted elms, sick rivers
Massacres would seem mere emblems of that
Desecration of ourselves?

I can see myself years back at Sunion
Hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes
In woman’s form, limping the long path
Lying on a headland over the dark sea
Looking down the red rocks to
Where a soundless curl
Of white told me a wave had struck
Imagining the pull of that
Water from that height
Knowing deliberate suicide wasn't my métier
Yet all the time nursing
Measuring that wound
Well, that’s finished the woman who cherished
Her suffering is dead i am her descendant
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me
But I want to go on from here with you
Fighting the temptation to make
A career of pain

Your silence today is a pond
Where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping
And brought into the sun
It’s not my own face I
See there, but other faces
Even your face at another age
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us
A watch of old gold
A water-blurred fever chart
A key even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
Deserve their glint of recognition
I fear this silence
This inarticulate life i'm waiting
For a wind that will gently
Open this sheeted water
For once, and show me what I can do
For you, who have often made the unnameable
Nameable for others, even for me

Your dog, tranquil and innocent
Dozes through
Our cries, our murmured dawn conspiracies
Our telephone calls she knows
What can she know?
If in my human arrogance I claim to read
Her eyes
I find there only my own animal thoughts:
That creatures must find each
Other for bodily comfort
That voices of the psyche
Drive through the flesh
Further than the dense brain
Could have foretold
That the planetary nights are
Growing cold for those
On the same journey, who want to touch
One creature traveler clear to the end
That without tenderness, we are in hell

Every peak is a crater this
Is the law of volcanoes
Making them eternally and visibly female
No height without depth, without
A burning core, though our straw soles shred
On the hardened lava
I want to travel with you
To every sacred mountain
Smoking within like the sibyl
Stooped over her tripod
I want to reach for your hand
As we scale the path
To feel you arteries glowing in my clasp
Never failing to note the small
Jewel-like flower
Unfamiliar to us, nameless till
We rename her
That clings to the slowly altering rock
That detail outside ourselves that
Brings us to ourselves
Was here before us, knew we would come
And sees beyond us

Sleeping, turning in turn like planets
Rotating in their midnight meadow:
A touch is enough to let us know
We’re not alone in the universe
Even in sleep:
The dream-ghosts of two worlds
Walking their ghost-towns
Almost address each other
I’ve wakened to your muttered words
Spoken light- or dark-years away
As if my own voice had spoken
But we have different voices, even in sleep
And our bodies, so alike
Are yet so different
And the past echoing through our bloodstreams
Is freighted with different language
Different meanings
Though in any chronicle of the world we share
It could be written with new meaning
We were two lovers of one gender
We were two women of one generation

The rules break like a thermometer
Quicksilver spills across the
Charted systems
We’re out in a country that has no language
No laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren
Through gorges unexplored since dawn
Whatever we do together is pure invention
The maps they gave us were out of date
By years we’re driving through the desert
Wondering if the water will hold out
The hallucinations turn to simple villages
The music on the radio comes clear
Neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung
But a woman’s voice singing old songs
With new words, with a quiet bass, a flute
Plucked and fingered by women outside the law

It was your vision of the pilot
Confirmed my vision of you: you said
He keeps
On steering headlong into the waves
On purpose
While we crouched in the open hatchway
Vomiting into plastic bags
For three hours between St
Pierre and Miquelon
I never felt closer to you
In the close cabin where
The honeymoon couples
Huddled in each other’s laps and arms
I put my hand on your thigh
To comfort both of us, your
Hand came over mine
We stayed that way, suffering together
In our bodies, as if all suffering
Were physical, we touched so in the presence
Of strangers who knew nothing and cared less
Vomiting their private pain
As if all suffering were physical

(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)

Whatever happens with us, your body
Will haunt mine tender, delicate
Your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
Of the fiddlehead fern in forests
Just washed by sun your traveled
Generous thighs
Between which my whole face has come and come
The innocence and wisdom of the place
My tongue has found there the live
Insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth
Your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
Me out
Your strong tongue and slender fingers
Reaching where I had been
Waiting years for you
In my rose-wet cave whatever happens, this is

If I lay on that beach with you
White, empty
Pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream
And lying on that beach we could not stay
Because the wind drove fine sand against us
As if it were against us
If we tried to withstand it and we failed
If we drove to another place
To sleep in each other’s arms
And the beds were narrow like prisoners’ cots
And we were tired and did not sleep together
And this was what we found
So this is what we did was the failure ours?
If I cling to circumstances I could feel
Not responsible only she who says
She did not choose, is the loser in the end

Across a city from you, I'm with you
Just as an August night
Moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I
Watched you sleep, the scrubbed
Sheenless wood of the dressing table
Cluttered with our brushes, books
Vials in the moonlight
Or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
Watching red sunset through the
Screendoor of the cabin
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder
Falling asleep to the music of the sea
This island of Manhattan is wide enough
For both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight
I know how your face
Lies upturned, the halflight tracing
Your generous, delicate mouth
Where grief and laughter sleep together

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines
They happen in our lives like car crashes
Books that change us, neighborhoods
We move into and come to love
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story
Women at least should know the difference
Between love and death no poison cup
No penance merely a notion
That the tape-recorder
Should have caught some ghost
Of us: that tape-recorder
Not merely played but should
Have listened to us
And could instruct those after us:
This we were, this is how we tried to love
And these are the forces they
Had ranged against us
And these are the forces we
Had ranged within us
Within us and against us
Against us and within us

Rain on the West Side Highway
Red light at Riverside:
The more I live the more I think
Two people together is a miracle
You're telling the story of your life
For once
A tremor breaks the surface of your words
The story of our lives becomes our lives
Now you’re in fugue across what some I'm sure
Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea
Those are the words that come to mind
I feel estrangement, yes as I’ve felt dawn
Pushing toward daybreak something: a
Cleft of light?
Close between grief and anger, a space opens
Where I am Adrienne alone and growing colder

Can it be growing colder when I begin
To touch myself again, adhesion pull away?
When slowly the naked face
Turns from staring backward
And looks into the present
The eye of winter, city, anger, poverty
And death and the lips part and say: I
Mean to go on living?
Am I speaking coldly when I
Tell you in a dream
Or in this poem, There are no miracles?
(I told you from the first
I wanted daily life
This island of Manhattan was
Island enough for me)
If I could let you know
Two women together is a work
Nothing in civilization has made simple
Two people together is a work
Heroic in it's ordinariness
The slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch
Where the fiercest attention becomes routine
Look at the faces of those who have chosen it

That conversation we were always on the edge
Of having, runs on in my head
At night the Hudson trembles
In New Jersey light
Polluted water yet reflecting even
Sometimes the moon and I discern a woman
I loved, drowning in secrets
Fear wound round her throat
And choking her like hair and this is she
With whom I tried to speak, whose hurt
Expressive head turning aside from pain
Is dragging down deeper
Where it cannot hear me
And soon I shall know I was
Talking to my own soul

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones
Of the great round rippled
By stone implements
The midsummer night light rising from beneath
The horizon where I said "a cleft of light"
I meant this and this is not Stonehenge
Simply nor any place but the mind
Casting back to where her solitude
Shared, could be chosen without loneliness
Not easily nor without pains to stake out
The circle, the heavy shadows
The great light
I choose to be the figure in that light
Half-blotted by darkness, something moving
Across that space, the color of stone
Greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
A woman i choose to walk here
And to draw this circle