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Автор Адриенна Рич
THE DREAM
OF A
COMMON
LANGUAGE
POEMS 1974–1977
ANDRIENNE RICH
W · W · NORTON & COMPANY
New York · London
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CONTENTS
I
POWER
Power
Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev
Origins and History of Consciousness
Splittings
Hunger
To a Poet
Cartographies of Silence
The Lioness
II
TWENTY-ONE LOVE POEMS
I.
Wherever in this city, screens flicker
II.
I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming
III.
Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time
IV.
I come home from you through the early light of spring
V.
This apartment full of books could crack open
VI.
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own
VII.
What kind of beast would turn its life into words
VIII.
I can see myself years back at Sunion
IX.
Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
X.
Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through
XI.
Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes
XII.
Sleeping, turning in turn like planets
XIII.
The rules break like a thermometer
XIV.
It was your vision of the pilot
(THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED)
XV.
If I lay on that beach with you
XVI.
Across a city from you, Fm with you
XVII.
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone
XVIII.
Rain on the West Side Highway
XIX.
Can it be growing colder when I begin
XX.
That conversation we were always on the edge
XXI.
The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones
III
NOT SOMEWHERE ELSE,
BUT HERE
Not Somewhere Else, but Here
Upper Broadway
Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff
Nights and Days
Sibling Mysteries
A Woman Dead in Her Forties
Mother-Right
Natural Resources
Toward the Solstice
Transcendental Etude
I go where I love and where I am loved,
into the snow;
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity
—H. D.
I
POWER
POWER
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
1974
PHANTASIA FOR ELVIRA SHATAYEV
(leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom died in a
storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s
husband found and buried the bodies. )
The cold felt cold until our blood
grew colder then the wind
died down and we slept
If in this sleep I speak
it’s with a voice no longer personal
(I want to say
When the wind tore our breath from us at last
we had no need of words
For months for years each one of us
had felt her own
