by Adrienne Rich
Our story isn't a file of photographs
faces laughing under green leaves
or snowlit doorways, on the verge of driving
away, our story is not about women
victoriously perched on the one
sunny day of the conference,
nor lovers displaying love.
Our story is of moments
when even slow motion moved too fast
for the shutter of the camera:
words that blew our lives apart, like so,
eyes that cut and caught each other,
mime of the operating room
where gas and knives quote each other
moments before the telephone
starts ringing: our story is
how still we stood,
how fast.
July 14, 2009
July 05, 2009
A Confession
by C.S. Lewis
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening--any evening--would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;*
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain** on a cocktail-shaker's nose;
Waterfalls don't remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I've never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone--
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops' brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.
Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d'estaminet.***
I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things... peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.
* - This is referring to T.S. Eliot's famous poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", in which Prufrock compares the sunset to an etherized patient.
** - Inflammatory swelling or sore caused by exposure to severe cold.
*** - I had to look this one up. It's referencing a poem by Jules Leforgue, and as for it's meaning... I found this quite helpful.
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I've stared my level best
To see if evening--any evening--would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;*
In vain. I simply wasn't able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
Red dawn behind a hedgerow in the east
Never, for me, resembled in the least
A chilblain** on a cocktail-shaker's nose;
Waterfalls don't remind me of torn underclothes,
Nor glaciers of tin-cans. I've never known
The moon look like a hump-backed crone--
Rather, a prodigy, even now
Not naturalized, a riddle glaring from the Cyclops' brow
Of the cold world, reminding me on what a place
I crawl and cling, a planet with no bulwarks, out in space.
Never the white sun of the wintriest day
Struck me as un crachat d'estaminet.***
I'm like that odd man Wordsworth knew, to whom
A primrose was a yellow primrose, one whose doom
Keeps him forever in the list of dunces,
Compelled to live on stock responses,
Making the poor best that I can
Of dull things... peacocks, honey, the Great Wall, Aldebaran,
Silver weirs, new-cut grass, wave on the beach, hard gem,
The shapes of horse and woman, Athens, Troy, Jerusalem.
* - This is referring to T.S. Eliot's famous poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", in which Prufrock compares the sunset to an etherized patient.
** - Inflammatory swelling or sore caused by exposure to severe cold.
*** - I had to look this one up. It's referencing a poem by Jules Leforgue, and as for it's meaning... I found this quite helpful.
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