Shattered Head

A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012)

A life hauls itself uphill

through hoar-mist steaming

the sun’s tongue licking

leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid

When? When? cry the soothseekers

but time is a bloodshot eye

seeing its last of beauty its own

foreclosure

a bloodshot mind

finding itself unspeakable

What is the last thought?

Now I will let you know?

or, Now I know?

(porridge of skull-splinters, brain tissue

mouth and throat membrane, cranial fluid)

Shattered head on the breast

of a wooded hill

Laid down there endlessly so

tendrils soaked into matted compose

became a root

torqued over the faint springhead

groin whence illegible

matter leaches: worm-borings, spurts of silt

volumes of sporic changes

hair long blown into far follicles

blasted into a chosen place

Revenge on the head (genitals, breast, untouched)

revenge on the mouth

packed with its inarticulate confessions

revenge on the eyes

green-gray and restless

revenge on the big and searching lips

the tender tongue

revenge on the sensual, on the nose the

carrier of history

revenge on the life devoured

in another incineration

You can walk by such a place, the earth is

made of them

where the stretched tissue of a field or woods

is humid

with beloved matter

the soothseekers have withdrawn

you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus

when that place utters its worn sigh

let us have peace

And the shattered head answers back

And I believed I was loved, I believed I loved

Who did this to us?

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• The Gardener XIV: I Was Walking by the Road by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener XIII: I Asked Nothing by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener X: Let Your Work Be, Bride by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LXXXIV: Over the Green by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LXXXIII: She Dwelt on the Hillside by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LXXXI: Why Do You Whisper So Faintly by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LXXVI: The Fair Was On by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LXXV: At Midnight by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LXVIII: None Lives For Ever, Brother by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LXIX: I Hunt for the Golden Stag by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LXIV: I Spent My Day by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LV: It Was Mid-Day by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LIX: O Woman by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener LI: Then Finish the Last Song by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener IX: When I Go Alone at Night by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Gardener IV: Ah Me by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Further Bank by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The Flower-School by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore
• The First Jasmines by Rabindranath Tagore by Rabindranath Tagore

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