Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

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  where undocumented intelligences travailed

  on earth they had no stake in

  though the dark leaves growing beneath white veils

  were beautifuland the barns opened out like fans

  All this of course could have been done differently

  This valley itself:one more contradiction

  the paradise fieldsthe brute skyscrapers

  the pesticidal wells

  I have been wanting for years

  to write a poemequal to these

  material forces

  and I have always failed

  I wasn’t looking for a muse

  only a reader by whomI could not be mistaken

  21.

  The cat-tails blaze in the cornersunflowers

  shed their pale fiery duston the dark stove-lid

  others stand guardheads bowedover the garden

  the fierce and flaring garden you have made

  out of your woes and expectations

  tilled into the earthI circle close to your mind

  crash into it sometimesas you crash into mine

  Given this strip of earthgiven mere love

  should we not be happy?

  but happiness comes and goes as it comes and goes

  the safe-house is temporarythe garden

  lies open to vandals

  this whole valley is one more contradiction

  and more will be asked of uswe will ask more

  22.

  In a bald skull sits our friendin a helmet

  of third-degree burns

  her quizzical melancholy grace

  her irreplaceable selfin utter peril

  In the radioactive desert walks a woman

  in a black dresswhite-hairedsteady

  as the luminous hand of a clock

  in circles she walksknitting

  and unknitting her scabbed fingers

  Her face is expressionlessshall we pray to her

  shall we speak of the loose pine-needleshow they shook

  like the pith of country summers

  from the sacks of pitchblende ore in the tin-roofed shack

  where it all began

  Shall we accuse her of denial

  first of the selfthen of the mixed virtue

  of the purest scienceshall we be wise for her

  in hindsightshall we scream It has come to this

  Shall we praise hershall we let her wander

  the atomic desertin peace?

  23.

  You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,

  the chemical industriesand pay

  that hush-money to the men

  who landed out there at twentynot for belief

  but because of who they wereand were called psychos

  when they said their bodies contained dioxin

  like memories they didn’t want to keep

  whose kids came out deformed

  You know nothing has changedno respect or grief

  for the losers of a lost war everyone hated

  nobody sent them to school like heroes

  if they started suing for everything that was done

  there would be no endthere would be a beginning

  My countrywedged fast in history

  stuck in the ice

  24.

  Someone said to me:It’s just that we don’t

  know how to cope with the loss of memory.

  When your own grandfather doesn’t know you

  when your mother thinks you’re somebody else

  it’s a terrible thing.

  Now just like that is this idea

  that the universe will forget us, everything we’ve done

  will go nowhere

  no one will know who we were.

  No one will know who we were!

  Not the young who will neverNor even the old folk

  who knew us when we were younginsatiable

  for recognition from them

  trying so fiercely not to be them

  counting on them to know usanywhere

  25.

  Did anyone ever know who we were

  if we means more than a handful?

  flower of a generationyoung white men

  cut off in the named, commemorated wars

  I stareJewishinto that loss

  for which all names become unspeakable

  not ever just the best and brightest

  but the most wretched and bedeviled

  the obscurethe strangethe driven

  the twinsthe dwarfsthe geniusesthe gay

  But ours was not the only loss

  (to whom does annihilation speak

  as if for the first time?)

  26.

  You:air-drivenreftfrom the tuber-bitten soil

  that was your portionfrom the torched-out village

  the Marxist study-groupthe Zionist cell

  café or chederZaddik or Freudianstraight or gay

  woman or manO you

  strippedbaredappalled

  stretched to mere spirityet still physical

  your irreplaceable knowledgelost

  at the mud-slick bottom of the world

  how you held fastwith your bone-meal fingers

  to yourselveseach otherand strangers

  how you touchedheld-up from falling

  what was already half-cadaver

  how your life-cry taunted extinction

  with its wild, crudeso what?

  Grief for you has rebellion at its heart

  it cannot simply mourn

  You:air-driven:reft:are yet our teachers

  trying to speak to us in sleep

  trying to help us wake

  27.

  The Tolstoyansthe Afro-American slaves

  knew this:you could be killed

  for teaching people to read and write

  I used to think the worst affliction

  was to be forbidden pencil and paper

  well, Ding Ling recited poems to prison walls

  for years of the Cultural Revolution

  and truly, the magic of written characters

  looms and dwindlesshrinks smallgrows swollen

  depending on where you stand

  and what is in your hand

  and who can read and why

  I think now the worst affliction

  is not to know who you are or have been

  I have learned this in part

  from writersReading and writing

  aren’t sacredyet people have been killed

  as if they were

  28.

  This high summer we love will pour its light

  the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment

  then before we’re ready will crash into autumn

  with a violence we can’t accept

  a bounty we can’t forgive

  Night frost will strike when the noons are warm

  the pumpkins wildly glowingthe green tomatoes

  straining huge on the vines

  queen anne and blackeyed susan will straggle rusty

  as the milkweed stakes her claim

  she who will stand at lastdark sticks barely rising

  up through the snowher testament of continuation

  We’ll dream of a longer summer

  but this is the one we have:

  I lay my sunburnt hand

  on your table:this is the time we have

  29.

  You who think I find words for everything

  this is enough for now

  cut it shortcut loose from my words

  You for whom I write this

  in the night hours when the wrecked cartilage

  sifts round the mystical jointure of the bones

  when the insect of detritus crawls

  from shoulder to elbow to wristbone

  remember:the body’s pain and the pain on the streets

  are not the samebut you can learn

  from the edges
that blurO you who love clear edges

  more than anythingwatch the edges that blur

  1983–1985

  TIME’S POWER

  (1985–1988)

  For Michelle

  SOLFEGGIETTO

  1.

  Your windfall at fifteenyour Steinway grand

  paid for by fire insurance

  came to me as birthrighta black cave

  with teeth of ebony and ivory

  twanging and thundering over the head

  of the crawling childuntil

  that child was set on the big book on the chair

  to face the keyboard world of black and white

  —already knowing the world was black and white

  The child’s handssmaller than a sand-dollar

  set on the keyswired to their mysteries

  the child’s wits facing the ruled and ruling staves

  2.

  For years we battled over music lessons

  mine, taught by youNor did I wonder

  what that keyboard meant to you

  the hours of solitudethe practising

  your life of prize-recitalslifted hopes

  Piatti’s nephew praising you at sixteen

  scholarships to the North

  Or what it was to teach

  boarding-school girls what won’t be used

  shelving ambitionbeating time

  to “On the Ice at Sweet Briar” or

  “The Sunken Cathedral” for a child

  counting the minutes and the scales to freedom

  3.

  Freedom: what could that mean, for you or me?

  —Summers of ’36, ’37, Europe untuned

  what I remember isn’t lessons

  not Bach or Brahms or Mozart

  but the rented upright in the summer rental

  One Hundred Best-Loved Songs on the piano rack

  And so you played, evenings and so we sang

  “Steal Away” and “Swanee River,”

  “Swing Low,” and most of all

  “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord”

  How we sang out the chorushow I loved

  the watchfires of the hundred circling camps

  and truth is marching on and let us die to make men free

  4.

  Piano lessonsThe mother and the daughter

  Their doomed exhaustiontheir common mystery

  worked out in finger-exercisesCzerny, Hanon

  The yellow Schirmer albumsquarter-restsdouble-holds

  glyphs of an astronomythe mother cannot teach

  the daughter because this is not the story

  of a mother teaching magic to her daughter

  Side by side I see us locked

  My wristsyour voiceare tightened

  Passion lives in old songsin the kitchen

  where another woman cooksteachesand sings

  He shall feed his flock like a shepherd

  and in the booklined room

  where the Jewish father reads and smokes and teaches

  Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Songs

  The daughter struggles with the strange notations

  —dark chart of music’s ocean flowers and flags

  but would rather learn by ear and heartThe mother

  says she must learn to read by sightnot ear and heart

  5.

  Daughter who fought her mother’s lessons—

  even today a scrip of music balks me—

  I feel illiterate in this

  your mother-tongueHad it been Greek or Slovak

  no more could your native alphabet have baffled

  your daughterwhom you taught for years

  held by a tetherover the ivory

  and ebony teeth of the Steinway

  It is

  the three hundredth anniversary of Johann

  Sebastian BachMy earliest life

  woke to his English Suitesunder your fingers

  I understand a language I can’t read

  Music you played streams on the car radio

  in the freeway night

  You kept your passions deepYou have them still

  I ask you, both of us

  —Did you think mine was a virtuoso’s hand?

  Did I see power in yours?

  What was worth fighting for?What did you want?

  What did I want from you?

  1985–1988

  THIS

  Face flashing freechild-arms

  lifting the collie pup

  torn paper on the path

  Central ParkApril ’72

  behind youminimal

  those benches and that shade

  that brilliant light in which

  you laughed longhaired

  and I’m the keeper of

  this little piece of paper

  this little piece of truth

  I wanted this from you—

  laughtera child turning

  into a boyat ease

  in the spring lightwith friends

  I wanted this for you

  I could mutterGive back

  that daygive me again

  that childwith the chance

  of making it all right

  I could yellGive back that light

  on the dog’s teeththe child’s hair

  but no rough drafts are granted

  —Do you think I don’t remember?

  did you think I was all-powerful

  unimpairedunappalled?

  yesyou needed that from me

  I wanted this from you

  1985

  LOVE POEM

  Tell me, bristler, where

  do you get such hair

  so quick a flareso strong a tongue

  Green eyesfierce curls

  there and here a mole

  a girl’s

  dimplesa warrior’s mind

  dark blood under gold skin

  testing, testing the world

  the word

  and so to write for you

  a pretty sonnet

  would be untrue

  to your mud-river flashing

  over rocksyour delicate

  coffee-bushes

  and more I cannot know

  and some I labor with

  and I mean to stay true

  even in poems, to you

  But there’s something more

  Beauty, when you were young

  we both thought we were young

  now that’s all done

  we’re serious now

  about deathwe talk to her

  daily, as to a neighbor

  we’re learning to be true

  with hershe has the keys

  to this houseif she must

  she can sleep over

  1986

  NEGOTIATIONS

  Someday if someday comes we will agree

  that trust is not about safety

  that keeping faith is not about deciding

  to clip our fingernails exactly

  to the same length or wearing

  a uniform that boasts our unanimity

  Someday if someday comes we’ll know

  the difference between liberal laissez-faire

  pluralism and the way you cut your hair

  and the way I clench my hand

  against my cheekbone

  both being possible gestures of defiance

  Someday if there’s a someday we will

  bring food, you’ll say I can’t eat what you’ve brought

  I’ll say Have some in the name of our

  trying to be friends, you’ll say What about you?

  We’ll taste strange meat and we’ll admit

  we’ve tasted stranger

  Someday if someday ever comes we’ll go

  back and reread those poems and manifestos

  that so enraged us in each other’s hand

  I’ll say, But damn, you wrote it so I

  couldn’t write it offYou’l
l say

  I read you always, even when I hated you

  1986

  IN A CLASSROOM

  Talking of poetry, hauling the books

  arm-full to the table where the heads

  bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,

  talking of consonants, elision,

  caught in the how, oblivious of why:

  I look in your face, Jude,

  neither frowning nor nodding,

  opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:

  a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking

  What I cannot say, is me. For that I came.

  1986

  THE NOVEL

  All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and

  Peace

  Prince Andrei’s cold eyes taking in the sky from the battlefield

  were your eyes, you went walking wrapped in his wound

  like a padded coat against the winds from the two rivers

  You went walking in the streets as if you were ordinary

  as if you hadn’t been pulling with your raw mittened hand

  on the slight strand that held your tattered mind

  blown like an old stocking from a wire

  on the wind between two rivers.

  All winter you asked nothing

  of that book though it lay heavy on your knees

  you asked only for a shed skin, many skins in which to walk

  you were old woman, child, commander

  you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing

  you felt your heart go still while your eyes swept the pages

  you felt the pages thickening to the left and on the right-

  hand growing few, you knew the end was coming

  you knew beyond the ending lay

  your own, unwritten life

  1986

  A STORY

  Absence is homesick. Absence wants a home.

  but Absence left without a glance at Home.

  Home tried to hold in Absence’s despite,