Adrienne Rich — Focus

(For Bert Dreyfus) Obscurity has its tale to tell. Like the figure on the studio-bed in the corner, out of range, smoking, watching and waiting. Sun pours through the skylight onto the worktable making a jar of pencils, a typewriter keyboard more than they were. Veridical light ... Earth budges. Now an empty coffee-cup, a whetstone, a handkerchief, take on their sacramental clarity, fixed by the wand of light as the thinker thinks to fix them in the mind. O secret in the core of the whetstones, in the five pencils splayed out like fingers of a hand! The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.