This Evening Let’s

Untitled Document

not talk

about my country   How
I’m from an optimistic culture

that speaks louder than my passport
Don’t double-agent-contra my

invincible innocence   I’ve
got my own

suspicions  Let’s
order restina

cracked olives and bread
I’ve got questions of my own but

let’s give a little
let’s let a little be

 

If friendship is not a tragedy
if it’s a mercy

we can be merciful
if it’s just escape

we’re neither of us running
why otherwise be there

Too many reasons not
to waste a rainy evening

in a backroom of bouzouki
and kitchen Greek

I’ve got questions of my own but
let’s let it be a little

 

There’s a beat in my head
song of my country

called Happiness, U.S.A.
Drowns out bouzouki

drowns out world and fusion
with its Get—get—get

into your happiness before
happiness pulls away

hangs a left along the piney shore
weaves a hand at you—“one I adore”—

Don’t be proud, run hard for that
enchantment boat

tear up the shore if you must but
get into your happiness because

before
and otherwise
it’s going to pull away

 

So tell me later
what I know already

and what I don’t get
yet   save for another day

Tell me this time
what you are going through

traveling the Metropolitan
Express

break out of that style
give me your smile
awhile

 

Credit

From The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 2004 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 

About this Poem

“This Evening Let’s” appears in The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004 (W. W. Norton, 2004) by Adrienne Rich. In her essay, “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet,” published in The Massachusetts Review (Autumn 1983), Rich wrote: “I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well. I write in full knowledge that the majority of the world’s illiterates are women, that I live in a technologically advanced country where forty percent of the people can barely read and twenty percent are functionally illiterate. [. . .] Because I can write at all—and I think of all the ways women especially have been prevented from writing—because my words are read and taken seriously, because I see my work as part of something larger than my own life or the history of literature, I feel a responsibility to keep searching for teachers who can help me widen and deepen the sources, and examine the ego that speaks in my poems—not for political ‘correctness’ but for ignorance, solipsism, laziness, dishonesty, automatic writing.”