Adrienne Rich — Like This Together

for AHC 1. Wind rocks the car. We sit parked by the river, silence between our teeth. Birds scatter across islands of broken ice. Another time I’d have said: “Canada geese,” knowing you love them. A year, ten years from now I’ll remember this— this sitting like drugged birds in a glass case— not why, only that we were here like this together. 2. They’re tearing down, tearing up this city, block by block. Rooms cut in half hang like flayed carcasses, their old roses in rags, famous streets have forgotten where they were going. Only a fact could be so dreamlike. They’re tearing down the houses we met and lived in, soon our two bodies will be all left standing from that era. 3. We have, as they say, certain things in common. I mean: a view from a bathroom window over slate to stiff pigeons huddled every morning; the way water tastes from our tap, which you marvel at, letting it splash into the glass. Because of you I notice the taste of water, a luxury I might otherwise have missed. 4. Our words misunderstand us. Sometimes at night you are my mother: old detailed griefs twitch at my dreams, and I crawl against you, fighting for shelter, making you my cave. Sometimes you’re the wave of birth that drowns me in my first nightmare. I suck the air. Miscarried knowledge twists us like hot sheets thrown askew. 5. Dead winter doesn’t die, it wears away, a piece of carrion picked clean at last, rained away or burnt dry. Our desiring does this, make no mistake, I’m speaking of fact: through mere indifference we could prevent it. Only our fierce attention gets hyacinths out of those hard cerebral lumps, unwraps the wet buds down the whole length of a stem.