Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev
BY ADRIENNE RICH
(Leader of a women’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and buried the bodies.)
The cold felt cold until our blood grew colder then the wind died down and we slept
If in this sleep I speak it’s with a voice no longer personal (I want to say with voices) When the wind tore our breath from us at last we had no need of words For months for years each one of us had felt her own yes growing in her slowly forming as she stood at windows waited for trains mended her rucksack combed her hair What we were to learn was simply what we had up here as out of all words that yes gathered to meet a No of no degrees the black hole sucking the world in
I feel you climbing toward me your cleated bootsoles leaving their geometric bite colossally embossed on microscopic crystals as when I trailed you in the Caucasus Now I am further ahead than either of us dreamed anyone would be I have become the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind the women I love lightly flung against the mountain that blue sky our frozen eyes unribboned through the storm we could have stitched that blueness together like a quilt
You come (I know this) with your love your loss strapped to your body with your tape-recorder camera ice pick against advisement to give us burial in the snow and in your mind While my body lies out here flashing like a prism into your eyes how could you sleep You climbed here for yourself we climbed for ourselves
When you have buried us told your story ours does not end we stream into the unfinished the unbegun the possible Every cell’s core of heat pulsed out of us into the thin air of the universe the armature of rock beneath these snows this mountain which has taken the imprint of our minds through changes elemental and minute as those we underwent to bring each other here choosing ourselves each other and this life whose every breath and grasp and further foothold is somewhere still enacted and continuing
In the diary I wrote: Now we are ready and each of us knows it I have never loved like this I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared and given back After the long training the early sieges we are moving almost effortlessly in our love
In the diary as the wind began to tear all the tents over us I wrote: We know now we have always been in danger down in our separateness and now up here together but till now we had not touched our strength
In the diary torn from my fingers I had written: What does love mean what does it mean “to survive” A cable blue fire ropes our bodies burning together in the snow We will not live to settle for less We have dreamed of this all of our lives