In honor of the life and death of Adrienne Rich -- a great poet, whom I have come to love more dearly in the last year or so -- I'd like to share with you my favorite poem of hers, at this juncture. She wrote it in 2008, which is kind of amazing, as she was 78 years old. She's unlike any other poet I've known.
Circum/Stances
A crime of nostalgia
--is it--to say
the objective conditions
seemed a favoring wind
and we younger then
--objective fact--
also a kind of subjectivity
Sails unwrapped to the breeze
no chart
*
Slowly repetitiously to prise
up the leaden lid where the forensic
evidence was sealed
cross-section of a slave ship
diagram of a humiliated
mind high resolution image
of a shredded lung
color slides of refugee camps
Elsewhere
(in some calm room far from pain)
bedsprings a trunk empty
but for a scorched
length of electrical cord
how these got here from where
what would have beheld
Migrant assemblage: in its aura
immense details writhe, uprise
*
To imagine what Become
present then
within the monster
nerveless and giggling
(our familiar our kin)
who did the scutwork
To differentiate
the common hell
the coils inside the brain
*
Scratchy cassette ribbon
history's lamentation song:
Gone, friend I tore at
time after time
in anger
gone, love I could
time upon time
nor live nor leave
gone, city
of spies and squatters
tongues and genitals
All violence is not equal
(I write this with a clawed hand)