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Adrienne Rich - Twenty-One Love Poems V
Work rating: Low

	 
	 
	 
	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.
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
	 
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