Adrienne Rich — Rusted Legacy

Imagine a city where nothing’s forgiven your deed adheres to you like a scar, a tattoo but almost everything’s forgotten deer flattened leaping a highway for food the precise reason for the shaving of the confused girl’s head the small boys’ punishing of the frogs — a city memory-starved but intent on retributions Imagine the architecture the governance the men and the women in power — tell me if it is not true you still live in that city. Imagine a city partitioned divorced from its hills where temples and telescopes used to probe the stormy codices a city brailling through fog thicket and twisted wire into dark’s velvet dialectic sewers which are also rivers art’s unchartered aquifers the springhead sprung open in civic gardens left unlocked at night I finger the glass beads I strung and wore under the pines while the arrests were going on (transfixed from neck to groin I wanted to save what I could) They brought trays with little glasses of cold water into the dark park a final village gesture before the villages were gutted. They were trying to save what they could — tell me if this is not the same city. I have forced myself to come back like a daughter required to put her mother’s house in order whose hands need terrible gloves to handle the medicinals the disease packed in those linens Accomplished criminal I’ve been but can I accomplish justice here? Tear the old wedding sheet into cleaning rags? Faithless daughter like stone but with water pleating across Let water be water let stone be stone Tell me is this the same city. This I — must she, must she lie scabbed with rust crammed with memory in a place of little anecdotes no one left to go around gathering the full dissident story? Rusting her hands and shoulders stone her lips yet leaching down from her eyesockets tears — for one self only? each encysts a city.