Adrienne Rich - Waking in the Dark lyrics

The thing that arrests me is
How we are composed of molecules
(he showed me the figure
In the paving stones)
Arranged without our knowledge and consent
Like the wirephoto composed
Of millions of dots
In which the man from Bangladesh
Walks starving on the front page
Knowing nothing about it
Which is his presence for the world

We were standing in line outside of something
Two by two, or alone in
Pairs, or simply alone
Looking into windows full of scissors
Windows full of shoes the street was closing
The city was closing
Would we be the lucky ones
To make it? They were showing
In a glass case, the Man Without A Country
We held up our passports in his face
We wept for him

They are dumping animal blood into the sea
To bring up the sharks sometimes every
Aperture of my body
Leaks blood i don’t know whether
To pretend that this is natural
Is there a law about this, a law of nature?
You worship the blood
You call it hysterical bleeding
You want to drink it like milk
You dip your finger into into it and write
You faint at the smell of it
You dream of dumping me into the sea

The tragedy of sex lies around us, a woodlot
The axes are sharpened for
The old shelters and huts
Stare through the clearing with
A certain resolution
The hermit’s cabin, the hunters’ shack
Scenes of masturbationand dirty jokes
A man’s world but finished
They themselves have sold it to the machines
I walk the unconscious forest
A woman dressed in old army fatigues
That have shrunk to fit her, I am lost
At moments, I feel dazed
By the sun pawing between the trees
Cold in the bog and lichen of the thicket
Nothing will save this i am alone
Kicking the last rotting logs
With their strange smell of life, not death
Wondering what on earth it
All might have become

Clarity, spray blinding and purging
Spears of sun striking the water
The bodies riding the air like gliders
The bodies in slow motion falling
Into the pool at the Berlin Olympics
Control loss of control the bodies rising
Arching back to the tower
Time reeling backward clarity of open air
Before the dark chambers
With the shower heads
The bodies falling again
Freelyfaster than light the water opening
Like air like realization
A woman made this film against
The law of gravity

All night dreaming of a body
Space weighs on differently from mine
We are making love in the street
The traffic flows off from us
Pouring back like a sheet
The asphalt stirs with tenderness
There is no dismay
We move together like underwater plants

Over and over, starting to wake
I dive back to discover you
Still whispering, touch me, we go on
Streaming through the slow
City light forest ocean
Stirring our body hair

But this is the saying of a dream on waking
I wish there were somewhere
Actual we could stand
Handing the power-glasses back and forth
Looking at the earth, the wildwood
Where the split began