Adrienne Rich

Ends of the Earth

All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a
				               broken television set.
Coarse-frosted karst crumbling as foam, eel-eyes piercing
				               the rivers.
Dark or light, leaving or landfall, male or female
				               demarcations dissolve
into the O of time and solitude. I found here: no
				               inter/
ruption to a version of earth so abandoned and abandoning
I read it my own acedia lashed by the winds
questing shredmeal toward the Great Plains, that ocean. My
				               fear.
Call it Galisteo but that's not the name of what happened
				               here.
If indoors in an eyeflash (perhaps) I caught the gazer
				               of spaces
lighting the two wax candles in black iron holders
against the white wall after work and after dark
but never saw the hand
how inhale the faint mist of another's gazing,
				               pacing, dozing
words muttered aloud in utter silence, gesture unaware
thought that has suffered and borne itself to the ends
				               of the earth
web agitating between my life and another's?
Other whose bed I have shared but never at once
				               together?

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Adrienne Rich's most recent books are Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations and Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995Ð1998. She was recently the recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. The poems published here are from her collection Fox, forthcoming from Norton in October 2001. contents | previous | next