This is how it feels to do something you are afraid of. That they are afraid of. (Would it have been different at Fort Dix, beginning to feel the full volume of tears in you, the measure of all you have in you to shed, all you have held back from false pride, false indifference, false courage beginning to weep as you weep peeling onions, but endlessly, for the rest of time, tears of chemistry, tears of catalyst, tears of rage, tears for yourself, tears for the tortured men in the stockade and for their torturers tears of fear, of the child stepping into the adult field of force, the woman stepping into the male field of violence, tears of relief, that your body was here, you had done it, every last refusal was over) Here in this house my tears are running wild in this Vermont of india-madras-colored leaves, of cesspool- stricken brooks, of violence licking at old people and children and I am afraid of the language in my head I am alone, alone with language and without meaning coming back to something written years ago: our words misunderstand us wanting a word that will shed itself like a tear onto the page leaving its stain Trying every key in the bunch to get the door even ajar not knowing whether it's locked or simply jammed from long disuse trying the keys over and over then throwing the bunch away staring around for an axe wondering if the world can be changed like this if a life can be changed like this It wasn't completeness I wanted (the old ideas of a revolution that could be foretold, and once arrived at would give us ourselves and each other) I stopped listening long ago to their descriptions of the good society The will to change begins in the body not in the mind My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every act of resistance and each of my failures Locked in the closet at 4 years old I beat the wall with my body the act is in me still No, not completeness: but I needed a way of saying (this is what they are afraid of) that could deal with these fragments I needed to touch you with a hand, a body but also with words I need a language to hear myself with to see myself in a language like pigment released on the board blood-black, sexual green, reds veined with contradictions bursting under pressure from the tube staining the old grain of the wood like sperm or tears but this is not what I mean these images are not what I mean (I am afraid.) I mean that I want you to answer me when I speak badly that I love you, that we are in danger that she wants to have your child, that I want us to have mercy on each other that I want to take her hand that I see you changing that it was change I loved in you when I thought I loved completeness that things I have said which in a few years will be forgotten matter more to me than this or any poem and I want you to listen when I speak badly not in poems but in tears not my best but my worst that these repetitions are beating their way toward a place where we can no longer be together where my body no longer will demonstrate outside your stockade and wheeling through its blind tears will make for the open air of another kind of action (I am afraid.) It's not the worst way to live. --Adrienne Rich |
Tear Gas |
October 12, 1969: reports of the tear-gassing of demonstrators protesting the treatment of G.I. prisoners in the stockade at Fort Dix, New Jersey) |