~ Adrienne Rich
Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world: I first began
a small, fixed dot, still see
that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack
pushed into the scene,
a hard little head protruding
from the pointillist's buzz and bloom.
After a time the dot
begins to ooze. Certain heats
melt it.
Now I was hurriedly
blurring into ranges
of burnt red, burning green,
whole biographies swam up and
swallowed me like Jonah.
Jonah! I was Wittgenstein,
Mary Wollstonecraft, the soul
of Louis Jouvet, dead
in a blown-up photograph.
Till, wolfed almost to shreds,
I learned to make myself
unappetizing. Scaly as a dry bulb
thrown into a cellar
*
I used myself, let nothing use me.
Like being on a private dole,
sometimes more like kneading bricks in Egypt.
What life was there, was mine,
now and again to lay
one hand on a warm brick
and touch the sun's ghost
with economical joy,
now and again to name
over the bare necessities.
So much for those days. Soon
practice may make me middling-perfect, I'll
dare inhabit the world
trenchant in motion as an eel, solid
as a cabbage-head. I have invitations:
a curl of mist steams upward
from a field, visible as my breath,
houses along a road stand waiting
like old women knitting, breathless
to tell their tales.