Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  striated with hairs of gold, like an almond-shell?

  The old, needless story. For if I’m here

  it is by choice and when at last

  I smell my own rising nausea, feel the air

  tighten around my stomach like a surgical bandage,

  I can’t pretend surprise. What is it I so miscarry?

  If what I spew on the tiles at last,

  helpless, disgraced, alone,

  is in part what I’ve swallowed from glasses, eyes,

  motions of hands, opening and closing mouths,

  Isn’t it also dead gobbets of myself,

  abortive, murdered, or never willed?

  1959

  JUVENILIA

  Your Ibsen volumes, violet-spined,

  each flaking its gold arabesque!

  Again I sit, under duress, hands washed,

  at your inkstained oaken desk,

  by the goose-neck lamp in the tropic of your books,

  stabbing the blotting-pad, doodling loop upon loop,

  peering one-eyed in the dusty reflecting mirror

  of your student microscope,

  craning my neck to spell above me

  A DOLLS HOUSELITTLE EYOLF

  WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN

  Unspeakable fairy tales ebb like blood through my head

  as I dip the pen and for aunts, for admiring friends,

  for you above all to read,

  copy my praised and sedulous lines.

  Behind the two of us, thirsty spines

  quiver in semi-shadow, huge leaves uncurl and thicken.

  1960

  DOUBLE MONOLOGUE

  To live illusionless, in the abandoned mine-

  shaft of doubt, and still

  mime illusions for others? A puzzle

  for the maker who has thought

  once too often too coldly.

  Since I was more than a child

  trying on a thousand faces

  I have wanted one thing: to know

  simply as I know my name

  at any given moment, where I stand.

  How much expense of time and skill

  which might have set itself

  to angelic fabrications! All merely

  to chart one needle in the haymow?

  Find yourself and you find the world?

  Solemn presumption! Mighty Object

  no one but itself has missed,

  what’s lost, if you stay lost? Someone

  ignorantly loves you—will that serve?

  Shrug that off, and presto!—

  the needle drowns in the haydust.

  Think of the whole haystack—

  a composition so fortuitous

  it only looks monumental.

  There’s always a straw twitching somewhere.

  Wait out the long chance, and

  your needle too could get nudged up

  to the apex of that bristling calm.

  Rusted, possibly. You might not want

  to swear it was the Object, after all.

  Time wears us old utopians.

  I now no longer think

  “truth” is the most beautiful of words.

  Today, when I see “truthful”

  written somewhere, it flares

  like a white orchid in wet woods,

  rare and grief-delighting, up from the page.

  Sometimes, unwittingly even,

  we have been truthful.

  In a random universe, what more

  exact and starry consolation?

  Don’t think I think

  facts serve better than ignorant love.

  Both serve, and still

  our need mocks our gear.

  1960

  A WOMAN MOURNED BY DAUGHTERS

  Now, not a tear begun,

  we sit here in your kitchen,

  spent, you see, already.

  You are swollen till you strain

  this house and the whole sky.

  You, whom we so often

  succeeded in ignoring!

  You, are puffed up in death

  like a corpse pulled from the sea;

  we groan beneath your weight.

  And yet you were a leaf,

  a straw blown on the bed,

  you had long since become

  crisp as a dead insect.

  What is it, if not you,

  that settles on us now

  like satin you pulled down

  over our bridal heads?

  What rises in our throats

  like food you prodded in?

  Nothing could be enough.

  You breathe upon us now

  through solid assertions

  of yourself: teaspoons, goblets,

  seas of carpet, a forest

  of old plants to be watered,

  an old man in an adjoining

  room to be touched and fed.

  And all this universe

  dares us to lay a finger

  anywhere, save exactly

  as you would wish it done.

  1960

  READINGS OF HISTORY

  He delighted in relating the fact that he had been born

  near Girgenti in a place called Chaos during a raging

  cholera epidemic.

  —Domenico Vittorini, The Drama of Luigi Pirandello

  I. The Evil Eye

  Last night we sat with the stereopticon,

  laughing at genre views of 1906,

  till suddenly, gazing straight into

  that fringed and tasseled parlor, where the vestal

  spurns an unlikely suitor

  with hairy-crested plants to right and left,

  my heart sank. It was terrible.

  I smelled the mildew in those swags of plush,

  dust on the eyepiece bloomed to freaks of mold.

  I knew beyond all doubt how dead that couple was.

  Today, a fresh clean morning.

  Your camera stabs me unawares,

  right in my mortal part.

  A womb of celluloid already

  contains my dotage and my total absence.

  II. The Confrontation

  Luigi Pirandello

  looked like an old historian

  (oval head, tufted white beard,

  not least the hunger

  for reconciliation in his eye).

  For fourteen years, facing

  his criminal reflection

  in his wife’s Grand Guignol mind,

  he built over and over

  that hall of mirrors

  in which to be appears

  to be perceived.

  The present holds you like a raving wife,

  clever as the mad are clever,

  digging up your secret truths

  from her disabled genius.

  She knows what you hope

  and dare not hope:

  remembers

  what you’re sick

  of forgetting.

  What are you now

  but what you know together, you and she?

  She will not let you think.

  It is important

  to make connections. Everything

  happens very fast in the minds

  of the insane. Even you

  aren’t up to that, yet.

  Go out, walk,

  think of selves long past.

  III. Memorabilia

  I recall

  Civil War letters of a great-grand-uncle,

  fifteen at Chancellorsville,

  no raconteur,

  no speller, either; nor to put it squarely,

  much of a mind;

  the most we gather

  is that he did write home:

  I am well,

  how are my sisters, hope you are the same.

  Did Spartan battle-echoes rack his head?

  Dying, he turned into his father’s memory.

  History’s queerly strong perfumes

  rise from the crook of this day�
�s elbow:

  Seduction fantasies of the public mind,

  or Dilthey’s dream from which he roused to see

  the cosmos glaring through his windowpane?

  Prisoners of what we think occurred,

  or dreamers dreaming toward a final word?

  What, in fact, happened in these woods

  on some obliterated afternoon?

  IV. Consanguinity

  Can history show us nothing

  but pieces of ourselves, detached,

  set to a kind of poetry,

  a kind of music, even?

  Seated today on Grandmamma’s

  plush sofa with the grapes

  bursting so ripely from the curved mahogany,

  we read the great Victorians

  weeping, almost, as if

  some family breach were healed.

  Those angry giantesses and giants,

  lately our kith and kin!

  We stare into their faces, hear

  at last what they were saying

  (or some version not bruited

  by filial irritation).

  The cat-tails wither in the reading-room.

  Tobacco-colored dust

  drifts on the newest magazines.

  I loaf here leafing ancient copies

  of LIFE from World War II.

  We look so poor and honest there:

  girls with long hair badly combed

  and unbecoming dresses—

  where are you now?

  You sail

  to shop in Europe, ignorantly freed

  for you, an age ago.

  Your nylon luggage matches

  eyelids

  expertly azured.

  I, too, have lived in history.

  V. The Mirror

  Is it in hopes

  to find or lose myself

  that I

  fill up my table now

  with Michelet and Motley?

  To “know how it was”

  or to forget how it is—

  what else?

  Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,

  Yankee nor Rebel, born

  in the face of two ancient cults,

  I’m a good reader of histories.

  And you,

  Morris Cohen, dear to me as a brother,

  when you sit at night

  tracing your way through your volumes

  of Josephus, or any

  of the old Judaic chronicles,

  do you find yourself there, a simpler,

  more eloquent Jew?

  or do you read

  to shut out the tick-tock of self,

  the questions and their routine answers?

  VI. The Covenant

  The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze,

  our fingers icy as a bunch of keys.

  Nothing will thaw these bones except

  memory like an ancient blanket wrapped

  about us when we sleep at home again,

  smelling of picnics, closets, sicknesses,

  old nightmare,

  and insomnia’s spreading stain.

  Or say I sit with what I halfway know

  as with a dying man who heaves the true

  version at last, now that it hardly matters,

  or gropes a hand to where the letters

  sewn in the mattress can be plucked and read.

  Here’s water.Sleep.No more is asked of you.

  I take your life into my living head.

  1960

  TO THE AIRPORT

  Death’s taxi crackles through the mist. The cheeks

  of diamond battlements flush high and cold.

  Alarm clocks strike a million sparks of will.

  Weeping:all night we’ve wept and watched the hours

  that never will be ours again: Now

  weeping, we roll through unforgettable

  Zion, that rears its golden head from sleep

  to act, and does not need us as we weep.

  You dreamed us, City, and you let us be.

  Grandiloquence, improvidence, ordure, light,

  hours that seemed years, and ours—and over all

  the endless wing of possibility,

  that mackerel heaven of yours, fretted with all

  our wits could leap for, envy batten on.

  Our flights take off from you into the sea;

  nothing you need wastes, though we think we do.

  You are Canaan now and we are lifted high

  to see all we were promised, never knew.

  1960

  THE AFTERWAKE

  Nursing your nerves

  to rest, I’ve roused my own; well,

  now for a few bad hours!

  Sleep sees you behind closed doors.

  Alone, I slump in his front parlor.

  You’re safe inside. Good. But I’m

  like a midwife who at dawn

  has all in order: bloodstains

  washed up, teapot on the stove,

  and starts her five miles home

  walking, the birthyell still

  exploding in her head.

  Yes, I’m with her now: here’s

  the streaked, livid road

  edged with shut houses

  breathing night out and in.

  Legs tight with fatigue,

  we move under morning’s coal-blue star,

  colossal as this load

  of unexpired purpose, which drains

  slowly, till scissors of cockcrow snip the air.

  1961

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

  To GPS

  Over the chessboard now,

  Your Artificiality concludes

  a final check; rests; broods—

  no—sorts and stacks a file of memories,

  while I

  concede the victory, bow,

  and slouch among my free associations.

  You never had a mother,

  let’s say? no digital Gertrude

  whom you’d as lief have seen

  Kingless? So your White Queen

  was just an “operator.”

  (My Red had incandescence,

  ire, aura, flare,

  and trapped me several moments in her stare.)

  I’m sulking, clearly, in the great tradition

  of human waste. Why not

  dump the whole reeking snarl

  and let you solve me once for all?

  (Parameter: a black-faced Luddite

  itching for ecstasies of sabotage.)

  Still, when

  they make you write your poems, later on,

  who’d envy you, force-fed

  on all those variorum

  editions of our primitive endeavors,

  those frozen pemmican language-rations

  they’ll cram you with? denied

  our luxury of nausea, you

  forget nothing, have no dreams.

  1961

  A MARRIAGE IN THE ’SIXTIES

  As solid-seeming as antiquity,

  you frown above

  the New York Sunday Times

  where Castro, like a walk-on out of Carmen,

  mutters into a bearded henchman’s ear.

  They say the second’s getting shorter—

  I knew it in my bones—

  and pieces of the universe are missing.

  I feel the gears of this late afternoon

  slip, cog by cog, even as I read.

  “I’m old,” we both complain,

  half-laughing, oftener now.

  Time serves you well. That face—

  part Roman emperor, part Raimu—

  nothing this side of Absence can undo.

  Bliss, revulsion, your rare angers can

  only carry through what’s well begun.

  When

  I read your letters long ago

  in that half-defunct

  hotel in Magdalen Street

  every word primed my nerves.

 
; A geographical misery

  composed of oceans, fogbound planes

  and misdelivered cablegrams

  lay round me, a Nova Zembla

  only your live breath could unfreeze.

  Today we stalk

  in the raging desert of our thought

  whose single drop of mercy is

  each knows the other there.

  Two strangers, thrust for life upon a rock,

  may have at last the perfect hour of talk

  that language aches for; still—

  two minds, two messages.

  Your brows knit into flourishes. Some piece

  of mere time has you tangled there.

  Some mote of history has flown into your eye.

  Will nothing ever be the same,

  even our quarrels take a different key,

  our dreams exhume new metaphors?

  The world breathes underneath our bed.

  Don’t look. We’re at each other’s mercy too.

  Dear fellow-particle, electric dust

  I’m blown with—ancestor

  to what euphoric cluster—

  see how particularity dissolves

  in all that hints of chaos. Let one finger

  hover toward you from There

  and see this furious grain

  suspend its dance to hang

  beside you like your twin.

  1961

  FIRST THINGS

  I can’t name love now

  without naming its object—

  this the final measure

  of those flintspark years

  when one believed

  one’s flash innate.

  Today I swear

  Only in the sun’s eye

  Do I take fire.

  1961

  ATTENTION

  The ice age is here.

  I sit burning cigarettes,

  burning my brain.

  A micro-Tibet,

  deadly, frivolous, complete,

  blinds the four panes.

  Veils of dumb air

  unwind like bandages

  from my lips

  half-parted, steady as the mouths