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censorship yet has to fight the‘ lesbian sex war’ against the barrier of what has come before and still exists in lesbian consciousness. 17
There is an object of desire who is unattainable; she is not perfect, she has‘ A coffee stain’ or a‘ birth mark’ but these imperfections do not stop the narrator from dreaming / sleeping with a lesbian apparition, she keeps the object’ s head‘ Just in case’. In‘ A Lover of( William) Shakespeare and( Virginia) Woolf’, this fantasy is compounded by the faulty water bottle where, like in‘ Inversion’, the‘ shop’ has‘ shut up’. The distance between the narrator and the object in‘ A Lover’ emphasizes the unsayable. There is an idea of perfection,‘ A new model army’ but again this is associated with a violence that is only pleasing to the phallic eye which moulds it. The shop is silenced, it has been‘ shut up’, and the narrator‘ cannot buy / cannot taste’ only the warmth of a‘ selective memory’ brings the object of desire closer. The fantasy of sex is anxiously destroyed by a series of cold images that flicker in her mind( the‘ flattened chest’,‘ blue lips’).
In‘ Birds’ too, the object is pleasing to the phallic when it becomes an animal.
Birds
A bird flies in the shape of young breasts, with curved wings in parallel. This wanderer stops and bounces happily in a sitz bath knowing the fissure will heal.
She flies above me, contemptuously, and defecates my hair. Slowly the motion drips down blonde follicles Turning them cherry red, not unlike entirely fresh, blood.
She is a pale missionary, an anaemic, who cannot attain enlightenment. Turbulence prompts her to lose weight, To avoid love.
Yet I can stroke her, like I would a young woman, but we would feel nothing.
There is an allusion to Rich’ s lesbian continuum here which has been invaded by modern male colloquium. According to Rich, all women are situated somewhere on the lesbian continuum, from experiencing the homosocial to homoerotic joys of lesbianism. 18 In the
17 Ibid., 119. 18 Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, ed., Adrienne Rich’ s Poetry and Prose( London:
Norton, 1993), see Adrienne Rich,“ Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, 4( 1980) 631-660.