Adrienne Rich — Calibrations

She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl where she will sit on beds and sing ballads from when Romany roamed Spain . . . A prosthetic hand calibrates perfectly the stem of a glass or how to stroke a face is this how far we have come to make love easy Ghost limbs go into spasms in the night You come back from war with the body you have . . . What you can’t bear carry endure lift you’ll have to drag it’ll come with you the ghostlimb the shadow blind echo of your body spectre of your soul . . . Let’s not talk yet of making love nor of ingenious devices replacing touch And this is not theoretical: A poem with calipers to hold a heart so it will want to go on beating