How does Adrienne Rich use imagery in Rusted Legacy?

The mood of the poem is suggested by the various disturbing and startling images that are scattered throughout. Some of the images, like that of the deer flattened on the highway, seem to have definite implications (the deer might symbolize wide-eyed innocence), but others seem to be highly personal references. The "trays with little glasses of water" the poet refers to in the second stanza, for example, seems to be something from her personal past. Some of the images recur in the poem in different forms. For example, there is a great deal of water imagery, beginning with the sewers, river, aquifers, and glasses of water in the second stanza to the water pleating across stone in the third stanza, to the poet's tears in the fourth stanza. How these images are tied together is not entirely clear, but the water at the end of the poem does seem to suggest hope for renewal and change. By using water imagery early on in the poem, the poet might be referring to possibilities for change that were not allowed to flourish or that were thwarted somehow. Again, much of the imagery in the poem is cryptic, and it is left as a challenge to the reader to read deeply and to explore possibilities of what individual references might be pointing to.