Adrienne Rich — After Dark

1) You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you old tree of life old man whose death I wanted I can't stir you up now. Faintly a phonograph needle whirs round in the last groove eating my heart to dust. That terrible record! how it played down years, wherever I was in foreign languages even over and over, I know you better than you know yourself I know you better than you know yourself I know you until, self-maimed, I limped off, torn at the roots, stopped singing a whole year, got a new body, new breath, got children, croaked for words, forgot to listen or read your mene tekel fading on the wall, woke up one morning and knew myself your daughter. Blood is a sacred poison. Now, unasked, you give ground. We only want to stifle what's stifling us already. Alive now, root to crown, I'd give -oh, - something - not to know our struggles now are ended. I seem to hold you, cupped in my hands, and disappearing. When your memory fails - no more to scourge my inconsistencies - the sashcords of the world fly loose. A window crashes suddenly down. I go to the woodbox and take a stick of kindling to prop the sash again. I grow protective toward the world. 2 Now let's away from prison - Underground seizures! I used to huddle in the grave I'd dug for you and bite my tongue for fear it would babble - Darling - I thought they'd find me there someday, sitting upright, shrunken, my hair like roots and in my lap a mess of broken pottery - wasted libation - and you embalmed beside me. No, let's away. Even now there's a walk between doomed elms (whose like we shall not see much longer) and something”grass and water” an old dream-photograph. I'll sit with you there and tease you for wisdom if you like, waiting till the blunt barge bumps along the shore. Poppies burn in the twilight like smudge pots. I think you hardly see me but - this is the dream now - your fears blow out, off, over the water. At the last, your hand feels steady.