Twenty-One Love Poems V

V

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, witnesses—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 woman’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 the 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.

This is poem V, from Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems collection, written between 1974-1976.  These were originally published as a complete collection but were later re-published and included as part of another collection of works, written between 1974-1977, called The Dream Of A Common Language.

Twenty-One Love Poems and The Floating Poem, (un-numbered) can all be found here at oldpoetry.