Attenuate the Loss and Find

For Adrienne Rich

shift the weight of song, heft and gnosis

“body poetics”

as a total event

her fullness rare in the amnesiac Kulchur

awake, awareness & urgency when poetry serves]

name appears
everywhere and in dream
body armor removed

what now, legacy, archivum
we female archons preserve of
intensity a durance a hand you recognize
(sounds sound)
assurance as lives on

drank of that
drank of this
almost suffocated, then drowned
downed but never

what only she could only know
as herself living in the brute time

speak of a syntax of rendition?
the politics of Empire chip away
as poetry attests, give it up

curve of a water-starved globe
to follow and be following?

racism, sexism, struggle

everything in intense grasp of
consciousness — cut in crystal observation
for her rapid and perched intellectus
privacy opens to vibrant light

this is stuff of Eros, of empathy
passionate edge of Adrienne
the American Skeptic

I feel you consociational in this light
a term of anthropology, to study
intersections in the annals we share

intergenerational, interspecies, interlanguage

move in parallelograms

getting it right as she did

Solstice, Boulder, Colorado 2012
High Park fires distress

Source: Poetry (March 2014)