Adrienne Rich - Later Poems: Selected and New

Out in this desert we are testing bombs, thats why we came here. Sometimes I feel an underground river forcing its way between deformed cliffs an acute angle of understanding moving itself like a locus of the sun into this condemned scenery. What weve had to give up to get here whole LP collections, films we starred in playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies, the language of love-letters, of suicide notes, afternoons on the riverbank pretending to be children Coming out to this desert we meant to change the face of driving among dull green succulents walking at noon in the ghost town surrounded by a silence that sounds like the silence of the place except that it came with us and is familiar and everything we were saying until now was an effort to blot it out Coming out here we are up against it Out here I feel more helpless with you than without you You mention the danger and list the equipment we talk of people caring for each other in emergencieslaceration, thirst but you look at me like an emergency Your dry heat feels like power your eyes are stars of a different magnitude they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT when you get up and pace the floor talking of the danger as if it were not ourselves as if we were testing anything else. 1971