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Collected Poems

Page 41

by Adrienne Rich


  At the end of winter something changes

  a faint subtraction

  from consolations you expected

  an innocent brilliance that does not come

  though the flower shops set out

  once again on the pavement

  their pots of tight-budded sprays

  the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold

  and at such a price

  though someone must buy them

  you study those hues as if with hunger

  Despair falls

  like the day you come home

  from work, a summer evening

  transparent with rose-blue light

  and see they are filling in

  the framework

  the girders are rising

  beyond your window

  that seriously you live

  in a different place

  though you have never moved

  and will not move, not yet

  but will give away

  your potted plants to a friend

  on the other side of town

  along with the cut crystal flashing

  in the window-frame

  will forget the evenings

  of watching the street, the sky

  the planes in the feathered afterglow:

  will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold

  where still you can manage

  to go on paying rent

  where still you can believe

  it’s the old neighborhood:

  even the woman who sleeps at night

  in the barred doorway—wasn’t she always there?

  and the man glancing, darting

  for food in the supermarket trash—

  when did his hunger come to this?

  what made the difference?

  what will make it for you?

  What will make it for you?

  You don’t want to know the stages

  and those who go through them don’t want to tell

  You have your four locks on the door

  your savings, your respectable past

  your strangely querulous body, suffering

  sicknesses of the city no one can name

  You have your pride, your bitterness

  your memories of sunset

  you think you can make it straight through

  if you don’t speak of despair.

  What would it mean to live

  in a city whose people were changing

  each other’s despair into hope?—

  You yourself must change it.—

  what would it feel like to know

  your country was changing?—

  You yourself must change it.—

  Though your life felt arduous

  new and unmapped and strange

  what would it mean to stand on the first

  page of the end of despair?

  1983

  WHEN/THEN

  Tell us

  how we’ll be together

  in that time

  patch of sun on a gritty floor; an old newspaper, torn

  for toilet paper and coughed-up scumDon’t talk, she said

  when we still love but are no longer young

  they bring you a raw purple stick and say

  it is one of her fingers;it could be

  Tell us

  about aging, what it costs, how women

  have loved forty, fifty years

  enamel basin, scraped

  down to the bare ironsome ashen hairsred fluid

  they say is her bloodhow can you

  Tell us about the gardens we will keep, the milk

  we’ll drink from our own goats

  she needs

  anti-biotics they say which will be given

  when you name namesthey show you her fever chart

  Tell us about communitythe joy

  of coming to rest

  among women

  who will love us

  you choose between your community

  and herlater others

  will come through the cellnot all of them will love you

  whichever way you choose

  Don’t talk, she said(you will learn to hear

  only her voice when they close in on you)Don’t talk

  Why are you telling us this?

  patch of sun on a gritty

  floor, bad dreams, a torn newspaper, someone’s blood

  in a scraped basin. …

  1983

  UPCOUNTRY

  The silver shadowwhere the line falls grey

  and pearlythe unborn villages quivering

  under the rockthe snailtraveling the crevice

  the furred, flying white insect like a tiny

  intelligence lacing the air

  this woman whose lips lie parted

  after long speech

  her white hair unrestrained

  All that you never paid

  or have with difficulty paid

  attention to

  Change and be forgiven!the roots of the forest

  mutteredbut you tramped throughguilty

  unable to take forgivenessneither do you

  give mercy

  She is asleep nowdangerousher mind

  slits the air like silktravels faster than sound

  like scissors flung into the next century

  Even as you watch for the trout’s hooked stagger

  across the lakethe crack of light and the crumpling bear

  her mind was on them first

  when forgiveness ends

  her love means danger

  1983

  ONE KIND OF TERROR: A LOVE POEM

  1.

  From 1964: a color snapshot:you

  riding a camel past the Great Pyramid

  its rough earthy diagonal shouldering

  the blue triangle of sky

  I know your white shirtdark skirtyour age

  thirty-fiveas mine was then

  your ignorance like mine

  in those yearsand your curious mind

  throw of your headbend of your gilt knees

  the laugh exchanged with whoever took the picture

  I don’t know how you were talking to yourself

  I know I was thinking

  with a schoolgirl’s ardent rectitude

  this will be the deciding year

  I am sick of drift

  Weren’t we always trying to do better?

  Then the voices began to say:Your plans

  are not in the book of plans

  written, printed and bound while you

  were absent

  no, not here nor in Egypt

  will you ever catch up

  2.

  So, thenas if by plan

  I turnand you are lost

  How have I livedknowing

  that day of your laughso alive/so nothing

  even the clothes you wore then

  rotted awayHow can I live believing

  any year can be the deciding year

  when I know the book of plans

  how it disallows us

  time for changefor growing older

  truthfullyin our own way

  3.

  I used to think you ought to be

  a womanin chargein a desperate time

  of whole populations

  such seemed the power of your restlessness

  I saw you a rescuer

  amid huge eventsdiasporas

  scatterings and returnings

  I needed this for us

  I would have gone to help you

  flinging myself into the fray

  both of us treading free

  of the roads we started on

  4.

  In the book of plans it is written

  that our lifelines shall be episodic

  faithlessfrayedlived out

  under impure violent rains

  and rare but violent sun

  It is written there that we may r
each

  like wan vines across a window

  trying to grasp each other

  but shall lack care and tending

  that water and air shall betray us

  that the daughter born a poet

  will die of dysentery

  while the daughter born to organize

  will die of cancer

  5.

  In the book of plans it says no one

  will speak of the book of plans

  the appearance will continue

  that all this is natural

  It says my grief for you is natural

  but my anger for us is not

  that the image of a white curtain trembling

  across a stormy pane

  is acceptablebut not

  the image I make of you

  arm raised hurlingsignalling

  the squattersthe refugees

  storming the food supply

  The book of plans says only that you must die

  that we all, very soon, must die

  6.

  Well, I am studying a different book

  taking notes wherever I go

  the movement of the wrist does not change

  but the pen plows deeper

  my handwriting flows into words

  I have not yet spoken

  I’m the sole author of nothing

  the book moves from field to field

  of testimonyrecording

  how the wounded teach each otherthe old

  refuse to be organized

  by foolshow the women say

  in more than one languageYou have struck a rock—

  prepare to meet the unplanned

  the ignoredthe unforeseenthat which breaks

  despairwhich has always travelled

  undergroundor in the spaces

  between the fixed stars

  gazing full-facedwild

  and calmon the Revolution

  7.

  Love:I am studying a different book

  and yes, a book is a finite thing

  In it your death will never be reversed

  the deaths I have witnessed sincenever undone

  The light drained from the living eyes

  can never flash again from those same eyes

  I make you no promises

  but something’s breaking open here

  there were certain extremes we had to know

  before we could continue

  Call it a book, or not

  call it a map of constant travel

  Call it a book, or not

  call it a songa ray

  of images thrown on a screen

  in open lotsin cellars

  and among those images

  one woman’s meaning to another woman

  long after death

  in a different world

  1983

  IN THE WAKE OF HOME

  1.

  You sleep in a room with bluegreen curtains

  postersa pile of animals on the bed

  A woman and a man who love you

  and each otherslip the door ajar

  you are almost asleepthey crouch in turn

  to stroke your hairyou never wake

  This happens every night for years.

  This never happened.

  2.

  Your lipssteadynever say

  It should have been this way

  That’s not what you say

  Youso carefully not asking, Why?

  Your eyeslooking straight in mine

  remind me of a woman’s

  auburn hairmy mother’s hair

  but you never saw that hair

  The family coilso twisted, tight and loose

  anyone trying to leave

  has to strafe the field

  burn the premises down

  3.

  The home houses

  miragesmemory fogs the kitchen panes

  the rush-hour traffic outside

  has the same old ebb and flow

  Out on the darkening block

  somebody calls you home

  night after nightthen never again

  Useless for you to know

  they tried to do what they could

  before they left for good

  4.

  The voice that used to call you home

  has gone off on the wind

  beaten into thinnest air

  whirling down other streets

  or maybe the mouth was burnt to ash

  maybe the tongue was torn out

  brownlung has stolen the breath

  or fear has stolen the breath

  maybe under another name

  it sings on AM radio:

  And if you knew, what would you know?

  5.

  But you will be drawn to places

  where generations lie

  side by side with each other:

  fathers, mothers and children

  in the family prayerbook

  or the country burying-ground

  You will hack your way through the bush

  to the Jodensavanne

  where the gravestones are black with mould

  You will stare at old family albums

  with their smilestheir resemblances

  You will want to believe that nobody

  wandered offbecame strange

  no woman dropped her baby and ran

  no father took off for the hills

  no axe splintered the door

  —that once at least it was all in order

  and nobody came to grief

  6.

  Anytime you go back

  where absence began

  the kitchen faucet sticks in a way you know

  you have to pull the basement door

  in before drawing the bolt

  the last porch-step is still loose

  the water from the tap

  is the old drink of water

  Any time you go back

  the familiar underpulse

  will start its throbbing:Home, home!

  and the hole torn and patched over

  will gape unseen again

  7.

  Even where love has run thin

  the child’s soul musters strength

  calling on dust-motessong on the radio

  closet-floor of galoshes

  stray catpiles of autumn leaves

  whatever comes along

  —the rush of purpose to make a life

  worth living past abandonment

  building the layers up again

  over the torn holefilling in

  8.

  And what of the stern and faithful aunt

  the fierce grandmotherthe anxious sister

  the good teacherthe one

  who stood at the crossing when you had to cross

  the woman hired to love you

  the skeleton who held out a crust

  the breaker of rulesthe one

  who is neither a man nor a womanthe one

  who warmed the liquid vein of life

  and day after day whatever the need

  handed it on to you?

  You who did and had to do

  so much for yourselfthis was done for you

  by someone who did what they could

  when others left for good

  9.

  You imagine an alleya little kingdom

  where the mother-tongue is spoken

  a village of shelterswoven

  or sewn of hidesin a long-ago way

  a shanty standing up

  at the edge of sharecropped fields

  a tenement where life is seized by the teeth

  a farm battened down on snowswept plains

  a porch with rubber-plant and glider

  on a steep city street

  You imagine the people would all be there

  fathers mothers and children

  the ones you were promised would all be there

  eatinga
rguingworking

  trying to get on with life

  you imagine this used to be

  for everyoneeverywhere

  10.

  What if I told you your home

  is this continent of the homeless

  of children soldtaken by force

  driven from their mothers’ land

  killed by their mothers to save from capture

  —this continent of changed names and mixed-up blood

  of languages tabooed

  diasporas unrecorded

  undocumented refugees

  underground railroadstrails of tears

  What if I tell you your home

  is this planet of warworn children

  women and children standing in line or milling

  endlessly calling each others’ names

  What if I tell you, you are not different

  it’s the family albums that lie

  —will any of this comfort you

  and how should this comfort you

  11.

  The child’s soul carries on

  in the wake of home

  building a complicated house

  a tree-house without a tree

  finding places for everything

  the songthe stray catthe skeleton

  The child’s soul musters strength

  where the holes were torn

  but there are no miracles:

  even children become exhausted

  And how shall they comfort each other

  who have come young to grief?

  Who will number the grains of loss

  and what would comfort be?

 

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