Adrienne Rich — A Woman Dead in Her Forties

1. Your breasts/ ---sliced-off ---The scars dimmed ---as they would have to be years later All the women I grew up with are sitting half-naked on rocks ---in sun we look at each other and are not ashamed and you too have taken off your blouse but this was not what you wanted: to show your scarred, deleted torso I barely glance at you as if my look could scald you though I'm the one who loved you I want to touch my fingers to where your breasts had been but we never did such things You hadn't thought everyone would look so perfect unmutilated you pull on your blouse again: ---stern statement: There are things I will not share with everyone 2. You send me back to share my own scars ---first of all with myself What did I hide from her what have I denied her what losses suffered how in this ignorant body did she hide waiting for her release till uncontrollable light began to pour from every wound and suture and all the sacred openings 3. Wartime. ---We sit on warm weathered, softening grey boards the ladder glimmers where you told me the leeches swim I smell the flame of kerosene ---the pine boards where we sleep side by side in narrow cots the night-meadow exhaling its darkness ---calling child into woman child into woman woman 4. Most of our love from the age of nine took the form of jokes and mute loyalty: ---you fought a girl who said she'd knock me down we did each other's homework wrote letters ---kept in touch, untouching lied about our lives: ---I wearing the face of the proper marriage you the face of the independent woman We cleaved to each other across that space fingering webs of love and estrangement ---till the day the gynecologist touched your breast and found a palpable hardness 5. You played heroic, necessary games with death since in your neo-protestant tribe the void was supposed not to exist except as a fashionable concept you had no traffic with I wish you were here tonight ---I want to yell at you Don't accept Don't give in But would I be meaning your brave irreproachable life, you dean of women, or your unfair, unfashionable, unforgivable woman's death? 6. You are every woman I ever loved and disavowed a bloody incandescent chord strung out across years, tracts of space How can I reconcile this passion with our modesty your calvinist heritage my girlhood frozen into forms how can I go on this mission without you you, who might have told me everything you feel is true? 7. Time after time in dreams you rise reproachful once from a wheelchair pushed by your father across a lethal expressway Of all my dead it's you who come to me unfinished You left me amber beads strung with turquoise from an Egyptian grave I wear them wondering How am I true to you? I'm half-afraid to write poetry for you ---who never read it much and I'm left laboring with the secrets and the silence In plain language: ---I never told you how I loved you we never talked at your deathbed of your death 8. One autumn evening in a train catching the diamond-flash of sunset in puddles along the Hudson I thought: ---I understand life and death now, the choices I didn't know your choice or how by then you had no choice how the body tells the truth in its rush of cells Most of our love took the form of mute loyalty we never spoke at your deathbed of your death but from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening We stayed mute and disloyal because we were afraid I would have touched my fingers to where your breasts had been but we never did such things