Adrienne Rich — For Example

Sometimes you meet an old man whose fist isn't clenched blue-white. Someone like that old poet whose grained palm once travelled the bodies of sick children. Back in the typed line was room for everything: the blue grape hyacinth patch, the voluntary touch of cheek on breast, the ear alert for a changed heartbeat and for other sounds too that live in a typed line: the breath of animals, stopping and starting up of busses, trashfires in empty lots. Attention once given returned again as power. An old man's last few evenings might be inhabited not by a public— fountains of applause off auditorium benches, tributes read at hotel banquets— but by reverberations the ear had long desired, accepted and absorbed. The late poem might be written in a night suddenly awake with quiet new sounds as when a searchlight plays against the dark bush-tangle and birds speak in reply.