Adrienne Rich — For Memory

Old words: trust fidelity Nothing new yet to take their place. I rake leaves, clear the lawn, October grass painfully green beneath the gold and in this silent labor thoughts of you start up I hear your voice: disloyalty betrayal stinging the wires I stuff the old leaves into sacks and still they fall and still I see my work undone One shivering rainswept afternoon and the whole job to be done over I can’t know what you know unless you tell me there are gashes in our understandings of this world We came together in a common fury of direction barely mentioning difference (what drew our finest hairs to fire the deep, difficult troughs unvoiced) I fell through a basement railing the first day of school and cut my forehead open— did I ever tell you? More than forty years and I still remember smelling my own blood like the smell of a new schoolbook And did you ever tell me how your mother called you in from play and from whom? To what? These atoms filmed by ordinary dust that common life we each and all bent out of orbit from to which we must return simply to say this is where I came from this is what I knew The past is not a husk yet change goes on Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark— freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together, inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.