Re-reading Emerson

Even when he was seventeen

he wrote in quotables,

the long looping sentences 

arcing the cliff edge

of pages: the transcendent

pitch for a new America. 

He was a train pulled by 

its own light. Even when 

writing of Goethe—

ahead in thought but each    

thought running steel

horizontal to his own. Or  

28 August 1833,  Rydal Mt,

arguing Carlyle to Wordsworth—

the oak intact in the acorn. 

The rose in the bud. 

Truth is, from the first slap 

to the final box, he flew 

by the seat of his rhetoric: 

a mantra of self-reliance 

propped up by an over-arching

idea—electric and universal.

When we discern justice,

when we discern truth, 

we do nothing of ourselves, 

but allow a passage to its beams. 

Truth was, he quickened each 

of his days into history 

suffering those beams. Derision, 

disdain, a son’s death, fire, and ever

his lost Ellen, her song coming  

out of the darkness, deep-toned 

and calling as from a dream.

It takes genius to live like that,

pulling a country behind you.

First published in Ekphrasis and winner of the Ekphrasis Prize for Poetry 2012

Adrienne Rich 

               1929-2012

She came to read her poems—

those straight-talk towers 

of brick and mortar—and to speak 

of the cracked earth and seething

rock beneath them. Each poem, 

a requiem for the rubble she stood in:

the twentieth century that cast her 

and cost her. A serious woman

who spent her life spending every

thing she had.

                       Outside the room, 

winter maples organized themselves

against the sky, and sparrows 

pecked at what they could find

as they had always done. And we, 

of the chicken salad and buttered roll, 

folded our linen napkins, laid 

down our silver, and hushed— 

waiting for gold.                                                

                           But as soon as 

she mounted the stage and leaned 

to the microphone, we leaned back 

and away in our chairs. You could 

barely discern it, but yes, back away 

is what we did, for in her voice 

and in the match strike of her eyes, 

she flared fire, and I saw again 

the ghost of the old refinery, the one

off Township Line Road, its towers 

lighting the night sky, each burning off 

in one pure flame the impurities we were. 

You see, she spoke true. She spoke witness. 

And we knew it.