I love Adrienne Rich’s poems, and one of my favourite collections of hers is The Will To Change (1971). I’ve been reading it again. I know now that the only way to read anything is again The title is taken from a John Donne poem.
A VALEDICTION FOBIDDING MOURNING
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips. The grammar turned and attacked me. Themes, written under duress. Emptiness of the notations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave; the experience of repetition as death the failure of criticism to locate the pain the poster in the bus that said; my bleeding is under control.
A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt; the language is a dialect called metaphor. These images go unglossed; hair, glacier, flashlight. When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time. When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. I could say; those mountains have a meaning but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
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