Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

III

I saw a beggar leaning on his crutch,

He said to me: Why do you ask for so much?

I saw a woman leaning in a door,

She said, Why not, why not, why not ask for more?

—Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire”

(as sung by Judy Collins)

MERCED

Fantasies of old age:

they have rounded us up

in a rest-camp for the outworn.

Somewhere in some dustbowl

a barbed-wire cantonment

of low-cost dustcolored prefab

buildings, smelling of shame

and hopeless incontinence

identical clothes of disposable

paper, identical rations

of chemically flavored food

Death in order, by gas,

hypodermics daily

to neutralize despair

So I imagine my world

in my seventieth year alive

and outside the barbed wire

a purposeless exchange

of consciousness for the absence

of pain. We will call this life.

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