486
RICHARD HOWARD
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
you could begin
. . .
every impulse of light exploding
from the core
as life flies out of us.
That concern of her earlier books which
is
indeed a myth of concern,
a solicitude of critique, of caring, nursing and tending, is pretty much
done away with here, except in one tender instance:
I have sucked the wound in your hand to sleep
but my lips were trembling.
Tell me how to bear myself,
how it's done, the light kiss falling
accurately
on the cracked palm.
And even here, the familiar - familiar, I mean, to Adrienne Rich's
other poems - taking of pains is turned into body English, the somatic
discharge of disaster ("I am bombarded yet / I stand") which will
allow her to expose, and even exult in, "external" events in terms of
self-sufficiency as well as of first aid to others:
the sole of the foot is a map, the palm of the hand a letter
learned by heart and worn close to the body
As is apparent in these quotations, pieces of language broken open,
dated but unpunctuated, with their axiological rather than external use
of enjambment - the line as notation rather than as unit, as tessera
rather than as structural member-
The Will to Change
is not made
up of discreet poems,
in
any sense, nor is it made up at all.
It
is a
text, a graph ("the surface is always lucid, / my shadows are under the
skin") which must be read through to the end, yielded to, held fast,
for these are notes toward a supreme somatic fiction:
The notes for the poem are the only poem
the mind collecting, devouring
all these destructibles
...
the mind of the poet is changing
the moment of change is the only poem
What is striking, what is even stricken about Adrienne Rich'·s poetry is
her probity and resource in the face of fracture, "the fracture of order /
the repair of speech / to overcome this suffering." For she is, like her
radical affiliates, determined to overcome. She is Sylvia Plath in reverse,
not eager or even willing to be still, to be stone, to be dead; but rather
letting the stillness be broken within and around her, letting herself be
lapidated (can we say stoned, any more?), letting herself discover what
