1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. And eachspeaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apartas if powerless, as if up against
a force of natureA poem can begin
with a lie. And be torn up.A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its ownfalse 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 apartmentthe picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephoneThe syllables uttering
the old script over and overThe loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lietwisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word3.
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquettethe blurring of terms
silence not absenceof words or music or even
raw soundsSilence can be a plan
rigorously executedthe blueprint of a life
It is a presence
it has a history a formDo not confuse it
with any kind of absence4.
How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to methough begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstractwithout wounding myself or you
there is enough pain hereThis 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 JoanFalconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the cameraIf there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as wordsstretched like skin over meanings of a night through which two people
have talked till dawn.6.
The scream
of an illegitimate voiceIt has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itselfHow do I exist?
This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answerI had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others7.
It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleumsIf at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thinga granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dewIf it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turntill you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare8.
No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these wordsmoving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child’s fingersor the newborn infant’s mouth
violent with hungerNo one can give me, I have long ago
taken this methodwhether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blueIf from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eyethe visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turnlike the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grainfor the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosingare these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
— Adrienne Rich