Tag: an atlas of the difficult world
Featured Poem: A woman of sixty
by Shannon Fox
By Adrienne Rich (from Eastern War Time) A woman of sixty driving the great grades sea-level to high desert a century slipping from her shoulders a blink in geological time though heavy to those who had to wear it Knowledge has entered her connective tissue and into sand dissolved her cartilage If her skeleton is found this will be clear or was it knowledge … Read More Featured Poem: A woman of sixty
Featured Poem: Dedications
by Shannon Fox
By Adrienne Rich I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven across … Read More Featured Poem: Dedications
Featured Poem: Streets closed
by Shannon Fox
By Adrienne Rich (from Eastern War Time) Streets closed, emptied by force Guns at corners with open mouths and eyes Memory speaks: You cannot live on me alone you cannot live without me I’m nothing if I’m just a roll of film stills from a vanished world fixed lightstreaked mute left for another generation’s restoration and framing I can’t be restored or framed I … Read More Featured Poem: Streets closed
Featured Poem: Final Notations
by Shannon Fox
By Adrienne Rich it will not be simple, it will not be long it will take little time, it will take all your thought it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath it will be short, it will not be simple it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart it will not be long, it will … Read More Featured Poem: Final Notations
Featured Poem: Two Arts
by Shannon Fox
By Adrienne Rich I’ve redone you by daylight. Squatted before your gauntness chipping away. Slivers of rock piling up like petals. All night I’d worked to illuminate the skull. By dawn you were pure electric. You pulsed like a star. You awoke in the last darkness before the light poured in. I’ve redone you by daylight. Now I can submit you to the arts … Read More Featured Poem: Two Arts
Featured Poem: One night on Monterey Bay
by Shannon Fox
By Adrienne Rich One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century: a precise, detached calliper-grip holds the stars and the quarter-moon in arrest: the hardiest plants crouch shrunken, a “killing frost” on bougainvillea, Pride of Madeira, roseate black-purple succulents bowed juices sucked awry in one orgy of freezing slumped on their stems like old faces evicted from cheap hotels –into the streets … Read More Featured Poem: One night on Monterey Bay
Featured Poem: On this earth
by Shannon Fox
By Adrienne Rich On this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you’re lonely. Lonely in the bar, on the shore of the coastal river with your best friend, his wife, and your wife, fishing lonely in the prairie classrooms with all the students who love you. You know some ghosts come everywhere with you yet leave them unaddressed for years. You … Read More Featured Poem: On this earth
Featured Poem: Here is a map of our country
by Shannon Fox
by Adrienne Rich Here is a map of our country: here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin we dare not taste its water This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy This is the … Read More Featured Poem: Here is a map of our country
Shannon Fox - Author 