devotion

Tonight I saw Adrienne Rich. She, with gnarled, arthritic hands -- tiny and bent -- pushing a wheeled walker across the stage, sitting in an ornate chair, announcing "this is the first poetry reading I have ever done not standing up" and I wanted to cry just then for her fragile human body housing fire and passion and power and knowledge and skill and art and love and beauty. She read poems and I sat on the edge of my seat and didn't stir until it was over. I bought two books and stood in the line to see her. I gave her a card I'd brought for her (tiny little her, sitting at the booksigning table, a person in miniature, how I towered!) and she took my card and slowly slipped it into a little canvas bag that lay on the table next to her water glass (water glass which she had to lift, like a child, with both hands, hands bent and knobbed, no longer supple enough to grasp) -- then, those knobbed, bent hands took up the pen delicately and wrote out her name in one book and then the other, pausing in between to look up at me, to look deeply into my eyes. And when she was done, and slowly pushed the books toward me, she looked at me again, into my eyes, holding my eyes, holding my eyes for an infinite moment, her dark little eyes, kind little eyes, holding mine, holding mine until I almost wondered if something was wrong. I said "thank you so much" trembling by this point, trembling, my eyes springing with water. And she, still holding my eyes, still holding, said "you are very welcome" -- and I wanted in that moment to throw my arms around her, or to pick her up like the hero in a movie and take her away, swing from a billowing curtain out a window and land in the seat of a horse drawn carriage that would whisk us off to the train station and we'd ride all night in a sleeper car and I'd either magically restore her youth or tenderly care for her in her physical decline, whatever, I didn't care, I just felt this pull, this deeply painful pull to stay there in her gaze forever.

But instead I broke the connection. I turned and walked away, swooning just a bit, and the tears which had been hovering finally came free and slid down and more came and more and more and I walked to my car in a blind daze, mouth open, panting, tears streaming and then, in my car, inexplicable sobbing, sobbing, sobbing all the way home as I drove, thinking "I should not be driving like this" but driving on anyway. Why? What feeling was wringing these sobs out of me? What had she done to me? What was shaken loose, set free, opened to the world, unfolded? All in her eyes, transmission of lineage. I sob under the weight of it.