Cartographies Of Silence

A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)

1.

A conversation begins

with a lie. and each

speaker of the so-called common language feels

the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against

a force of nature

A poem can being

with a lie. And be torn up.

A conversation has other laws

recharges itself with its own

false energy, Cannot be torn

up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus

the isolation it denies.

2.

The classical music station

playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up

and again picking up the telephone

The syllables uttering

the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar

living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror

beneath the unsaid word

3.

The technology of silence

The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms

silence not absence

of words or music or even

raw sounds

Silence can be a plan

rigorously executed

the blueprint of a life

It is a presence

it has a history a form

Do not confuse it

with any kind of absence

4.

How calm, how inoffensive these words

begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger

Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you

there is enough pain here

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?

to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

5.

The silence strips bare:

In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan

Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography

mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen

not as blank space or as words

stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people

have talked till dawn.

6.

The scream

of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore

it asks itself

How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you

I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them

The is useless to you and perhaps to others

7.

It was an old theme even for me:

Language cannot do everything-

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets

lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem

could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head

alight with dew

If it could simply look you in the face

with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing,

were finally clarified together in its stare

8.

No. Let me have this dust,

these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy

like the blind child’s fingers

or the newborn infant’s mouth

violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago

taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack

or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy

the pure annunciation to the eye

the visio beatifica

if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant

holding up a single ear of grain

for the return to the concrete and everlasting world

what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, conversations

from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

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