Origins and History of Consciousness (Adrienne Rich)

  I.

  Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
  sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
  dissected, their bird-wings severed
  like trophies. No one lives in this room
  without living through some kind of crisis.

  No one lives in this room
  without confronting the whiteness of the wall
  behind the poems, planks of books,
  photographs of dead heroines.
  Without contemplating last and late
  the true nature of poetry. The drive
  to connect. The dream of a common language.

  Thinking of lovers, their bind faith, their
  experienced crucifixions,
  my envy is not simple. I have dreamed of going to bed
  as walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood
  white as cold sheets, thinking, I’ll freeze in there.
  My bare feet are numbed already by the snow
  but the water
  is mild, I sink and float
  like a warm amphibious animal
  that has broken the net, has run
  through fields of snow leaving no print;
  this water washes off the scent—
  You are clear now
  of the hunter, the trapper
  the wardens of the mind—

  yet the warm animal dreams on
  of another animal
  swimming under the snow-flecked surface of the pool,
  and wakes, and sleeps again.

  No one sleeps in this room without
  the dream of a common language.


  II.

  It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes
  into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known
  from the first…. It was simple to touch you
  against the hacked background, the grain of what we
  had been, the choices, years…. It was even simple
  to take each other’s lives in our hands, as bodies.

  What is not simple: to wake from drowning
  from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth
  into this common, acute particularity
  these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching—
  to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass
  sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream
  of someone beaten up far down in the street
  causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream

  knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged
  as any woman must who stands to survive this city,
  this century, this life…
  each of us having loved the flesh in its clenched or loosened beauty
  better than trees or music (yet loving those too
  as if they were flesh—and they are—but the flesh
  of beings unfathomed as yet in our roughly literal life).


  III.

  It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
  dress, go out, drink coffee,
  enter a life again. It isn’t simple
  to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
  of one neither strange nor familiar
  whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
  we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
  downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
  over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
  of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
  which I remember as drenched in light.
  I want to call this, life.

  But I can’t call it life until we start to move
  beyond this secret circle of fire
  where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
  where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
  like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.