Adrienne Rich — In Plain Sight

My neighbor moving in a doorframe moment’s reach of her hand then withdrawn As from some old guilty pleasure Smile etched like a scar which must be borne Smile in a photograph taken against one’s will Her son up on a ladder stringing along the gutter electric icicles in a temperate zone If the suffering hidden in plain sight is of her past her future or the thin-ice present where we’re balancing here or how she sees it I can’t presume . . . Ice-thin. Cold and precarious the land I live in and have argued not to leave Cold on the verge of crease crack without notice ice-green disjuncture treasoning us to flounder cursing each other Cold and grotesque the sex the grimaces the grab A privilege you say to live here A luxury Everyone still wants to come here! You want a Christmas card, a greeting to tide us over with pictures of the children then you demand a valentine an easterlily anything for the grab a mothersday menu wedding invitation It’s not as in a museum that I observe and mark in every Face I meet under crazed surfaces traces of feeling locked in shadow Not as in a museum of history do I pace here nor as one who in a show of bland paintings shrugs and walks on I gaze through faces not as an X-ray nor as paparazzo shooting the compromised celebrity nor archaeologist filming the looted site nor as the lover tearing out of its frame the snapshot to be held to a flame but as if a mirror forced to reflect a room the figures standing the figures crouching