Adrienne Rich — The Phenomenology of Anger

1. The freedom of the wholly mad to smear & play with her madness write with her fingers dipped in it the length of a room which is not, of course, the freedom you have, walking on Broadway to stop & turn back or go on 10 blocks; 20 blocks but feels enviable maybe to the compromised curled in the placenta of the real which was to feed & which is strangling her. 2. Trying to light a log that’s lain in the damp as long as this house has stood: even with dry sticks I can’t get started even with thorns. I twist last year into a knot of old headlines —this rose won’t bloom. How does a pile of rags the machinist wiped his hands on feel in its cupboard, hour upon hour? Each day during the heat-wave they took the temperature of the haymow. I huddled fugitive in the warm sweet simmer of the hay muttering: Come. 3. Flat heartland of winter. The moonmen come back from the moon the firemen come out of the fire. Time without a taste: time without decisions. Self-hatred, a monotone in the mind. The shallowness of a life lived in exile even in the hot countries. Cleaver, staring into a window full of knives. 4. White light splits the room. Table. Window. Lampshade. You. My hands, stick in a new way. Menstrual blood seeming to leak from your side. Will the judges try to tell me which was the blood of whom? 4. Madness. Suicide. Murder. Is there no way out but these? The enemy, always just out of sight snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded in a snowy blur, abominable snowman —at once the most destructive and the most elusive being gunning down the babies at My Lai vanishing in the face of confrontation. The prince of air and darkness computing body counts, masturbating in the factory of facts. 6. Fantasies of murder: not enough: to kill is to cut off from pain but the killer goes on hurting Not enough. When I dream of meeting the enemy, this is my dream: white acetylene ripples from my body effortlessly released perfectly trained on the true enemy raking his body down to the thread of existence burning away his lie leaving him in a new world; a changed man 7. I suddenly see the world as no longer viable: you are out there burning the crops with some new sublimate This morning you left the bed we still share and went out to spread impotence upon the world I hate you. I hate the mask you wear, your eyes assuming a depth they do not possess, drawing me into the grotto of your skull the landscape of bone I hate your words they make me think of fake revolutionary bills crisp imitation parchment they sell at battlefields. Last night, in this room, weeping I asked you: what are you feeling? do you feel anything? Now in the torsion of your body as you defoliate the fields we lived from I have your answer. 8. Dogeared earth. Wormeaten moon. A pale cross-hatching of silver lies like a wire screen on the black water. Al these phenomena are temporary. I would have loved to live in a world of women and men gaily in a collusion with green leaves, stalks, building mineral cities, transparent domes, little huts of woven grass each with its own pattern— a conspiracy to coexist with the Crab Nebula, the exploding universe, the Mind— 9. The only real love I have ever felt was for children and other women. Everything else was lust, pity, self-hatred, pity, lust. This is a woman’s confession. Now, look again at the face of Boticelli’s Venus, Kali, the Judith of Chartres with her so-called smile. 10. how we are burning up our lives testimony: the subway hurtling to Brooklyn her head on her knees asleep or drugged la vía del tren subterráneo es peligrosa many sleep the whole way others sit staring holes of fire into the air others plan rebellion: night after night awake in prison, my mind licked at the mattress like a flame till the cellblock went up roaring Thoreau setting fire to the woods Every act of becoming conscious (it says here in this book) is an unnatural act