For Adrienne Rich
[Our burden to carry as she did
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