Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

will seek and find you

  2005

  HUBBLE PHOTOGRAPHS: AFTER SAPPHO

  It should be the most desired sight of all

  the person with whom you hope to live and die

  walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight

  Should be yet I say there is something

  more desirable:the ex-stasis of galaxies

  so out from us there’s no vocabulary

  but mathematics and optics

  equations letting sight pierce through time

  into liberations, lacerations of light and dust

  exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous,

  gorgeous

  beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream

  beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death

  or life, rage

  for order, rage for destruction

  —beyond this love which stirs

  the air every time she walks into the room

  These impersonae, however we call them

  won’t invade us as on movie screens

  they are so old, so new, we are not to them

  we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze

  of our tilted gazing

  but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them

  For Jack Litewka

  2005

  THIS IS NOT THE ROOM

  of polished tables lit with medalled

  torsos bent toward microphones

  where ears lean hands scribble

  “working the dark side”

  —glazed eye meeting frozen eye—

  This is not the room where tears down carven

  cheeks track rivulets in the scars

  left by the gouging tool

  where wood itself is weeping

  where the ancient painted eye speaks to the living eye

  This is the room

  where truth scrubs around the pedestal of the toilet

  flings her rag into the bucket

  straightens upspits at the mirror

  2005

  UNKNOWN QUANTITY

  Spring nights you pillow your head on a sack

  of rich compostCharcoal, your hair

  sheds sparks through your muttered dreams

  Deep is your sleep in the starless dark

  and you wake in your live skin to show me

  a tulipNot the prizewinning Queen of the Night

  furled in her jade wrappings

  but the Prince of Darkness, the not-yet, the X

  crouched in his pale bulb

  held out in the palm of your hand

  Shall we bury him wait and see what happens

  will there be time for waiting and to see

  2005

  TACTILE VALUE

  from crush and splinter

  death in the market

  jeering robotic

  dry-ice disrupt

  to conjure this:

  perishing

  persistent script

  scratched-up smeared

  and torn

  let hair, nail cuttings

  nourish the vine and fig tree

  let man, woman

  eat, be sheltered

  •

  Marx the physician laid his ear

  on the arhythmic heart

  felt the belly

  diagnosed the pain

  did not precisely write

  of lips roaming damp skin

  hand plunged in hairbed-laughter

  mouth clasping mouth

  (what we light with this coalspark

  living instantly in us

  if it continue

  2005–2006

  MIDNIGHT, THE SAME DAY

  i

  When the sun seals my eyes the emblem

  of failure will still be standing

  motionless at this intersection

  between family restaurant

  and medical clinic

  wearing his cardboard necklace lettered

  H ARD LU CK

  until his sister

  the Fury of reparations

  descends

  curdling the air in whirlwind

  tears it from his neck

  picks him up and hurls on

  ii

  Try to rest now, says a voice.

  Another:Give yourself time.

  But rest is no act of will

  and gifts to the self come back unopened

  Milk will boil down in the iron pot

  blistering into black sugar,

  scalded vinegar lift

  crispened layers

  pages of a codex

  in a library blown away

  2005

  EVEN THEN MAYBE

  Not spentthose bloodshot friendshipsthose

  soul-marriages sealed and torn

  those smiles of pain

  I told her a mouthful

  I shut my mouth against him

  Throat thick with tears

  how words sound when you swallow

  —and under the roof

  of the mouthlong stroke

  reaching from the tongue’s root

  No, I was not living with her at the time

  At the time I was not living

  with him, at the time we were living together

  I was living with neither of them

  —was dwelling you could say

  But as for living at that time

  we were all living together with many others

  for whom living was precisely the question

  Haven’t seen evenings like that since

  vesuvian emerald to brass dissolving

  —a sentence you’d waited for

  taken back half-spoken—

  Luxury even then maybe

  evenings like those

  2005

  DIRECTOR’S NOTES

  You don’t want a harsh outcry here

  not to violate the beauty yet

  dawn unveiling ochre village

  but to show coercion

  within that beauty, endurance required

  Begin with girl

  pulling hand over hand on chain

  only sound drag and creak

  in time it becomes monotonous

  then must begin sense of unease produced by monotony

  repetitive motion, repetitive sound

  resistance, irritation

  increasing for the viewers

  sense of what are they here for, anyway

  dislike of the whole thing how boring to watch

  (they aren’t used to duration

  this was a test)

  Keep that dislike that boredom as a value

  also as risk

  so when bucket finally tinks at rim

  they breathe a sigh, not so much relief

  as finally grasping

  what all this was for

  dissolve as she dips from bucket

  2005

  REREADING THE DEAD LECTURER

  Overthrow.And make new.

  An idea.And we felt it.

  A meaning.And we caught it

  as the dimensions spread, gathering

  in pre-utopian basementsfigured shadows

  scrawled with smoke and music.

  Shed the dead hand,

  let sound be sense.A world

  echoing everywhere, Fanon, Freire, thin pamphlets lining

  raincoat pockets, poetry on walls, damp purple mimeos cranking

  —the feeling of an idea.An idea of feeling.

  That love could be so resolute

  And the past?Overthrow of systems, forms

  could not overthrow the past

  nor our

  neglect of consequences.

  Nor that cold will we misnamed.

  There were consequences.A world

  repeating everywhere:the obliterations.

  What’s surreal, hyperreal, virtual,

  what’s poetry what’s verse what’s new.What is

/>   a political art. If we

  (who?) ever were conned

  into mere definitions.

  If we

  accept

  (book of a soul contending

  2005

  III

  LETTERS CENSORED

  SHREDDED

  RETURNED TO SENDER

  OR JUDGED UNFIT TO SEND

  Unless in quotation marks (for which see Notes on the Poems), the letter fragments are written by various imaginary persons.

  “We must prevent this mind from functioning …”: words of the prosecutor sentencing Antonio Gramsci to prison, June 2, 1928.

  —Could you see me laboring over this

  right arm in sling, typing left-handed with one finger—

  {On a scale of one to ten what is your pain today}

  •

  —shall I measure the split atoms

  of pleasure flying outward from the core—

  •

  —To think of her naked every day unfreezes me—

  •

  Banditry, rapes, burning the woods

  “a kind of primitive class struggle

  with no lasting or effective results”

  —The bakers strike, the needleworkers strike, the mechanics strike,

  the miners strike

  the great machine coughs out the pieces and hurtles on—

  •

  —then there are days all thought comes down to sound:

  Rust.August. Mattress.Must.

  Chains …

  —when consciousness + sensation feels like/ = suffering—

  •

  —the people, yes, as yet unformed—deformed—no: disinformed—

  •

  —What’s realistic fantasy?—Call it hope—

  •

  —heard your voice on the news tonight, its minor key

  your old-fashioned mindfulness—could have loved you again—

  •

  —Autumn invades my body, anger

  wrapped in forgiving sunlight, fear of the cold—

  •

  —Words gather like flies above this carcass of meaning—

  •

  “this void, this vacuum”

  •

  —You think you are helpless because you are empty-handed

  of concepts that could become your strength—

  •

  —we’re told it’s almost over, but we see no sign of it yet—

  •

  “caught between a feeling of immense tenderness for you

  which seems … a weakness

  that could only be consoled

  by an immediate physical caress …”

  [We must prevent this mind from functioning for twenty years]

  “… and these inadequate, cold and colorless words”

  •

  —What I meant to write, belov’d critic, then struck it out

  thinking you might accuse me of

  whatever you would:

  I wanted a sensual materialism to utter pleasure

  Something beyond a cry that could sound like a groan—

  •

  —Vocalizing forbidden syllables—

  •

  —our mythologies choke us, we have enthralled ourselves—

  •

  [Writing like this for the censors

  but I won’t hide behind words]

  •

  “my body cells revolve in unison

  with the whole universe

  The cycle of the seasons, the progression of the solstices

  and equinoxes

  I feel them as flesh of my flesh

  and under the snow the first violets are already trembling

  In short, time has seemed to me a thing of flesh

  ever since space

  ceased to exist for me”

  •

  —History = bodies in time—

  or, in your language:

  •

  —to think of the one asleep

  in that field beside the chimney

  of the burnt-out house

  a thing of flesh, exhausted—

  •

  —this flash is all we know. … can we shut our eyes to it … ?—

  •

  —more and more I dread futility—

  “The struggle, whose normal external expressions

  have been choked,

  attaches itself to the structure

  of the old class like a destructive gangrene …

  it takes on morbid forms of mysticism,

  sensualism, moral indifference,

  physical and psychic pathological depravations …

  The old structure does not contain and is unable

  to satisfy the new needs …”

  •

  —Trying to hold an inner focus while hoarse laughter

  ricochets from the guardroom—

  •

  —liquefactionis a word I might use for how I would take you—

  •

  —the daunted river finally

  undammed?—

  [prevent this mind]

  2005

  IV

  IF/AS THOUGH

  you’d spin out on your pirate platter

  chords I’d receive on my crystal set

  blues purpling burgundy goblets

  Lorca’s piano spuming up champagne flutes

  could drop over any night at will

  with that bottle of Oregon Pinot to watch Alexander Nevsky

  If no curfews no blackouts no

  no-fly lists no profiling racial genital mental

  If all necessary illicits blew in

  like time-release capsules or spores in the mulch

  up-rising as morels, creviced and wild-deliciousIf

  Gerard Manley Hopkins were here to make welsh rarebit

  reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland to Hart Crane in his high tenor

  guessing him captive audience to sprung rhythmas we in lóst lóve

  sequenceshearing it

  skim uncurfewed, uncowled

  pelicans over spindrift beating agnostic wings

  For Ed Pavlić

  2006

  TIME EXPOSURES

  i

  Glance into glittering moisture

  webbed in lashesunshed tears

  I’d guess as yours

  Known odor inhaled years later

  in a brief social kisssudden conjuncture

  soap, sweat, breath, hairother embraces

  diffusedonce, again, time’s exhilarations

  ii

  Is there a doctor in the house

  who in his plain mindful way

  cared for his patients through

  pain rain and snow

  who at each and every grave

  side knew

  what could be done

  he’d done

  And where have all the patients gone

  who wanted (more than one)

  a tending hand

  across the foreheadat the end

  And what’s the house?

  iii

  They’d say she was humorless

  didn’t go to the parties

  giggleshow white teeth

  So would suspend her in

  their drained

  definitions

  Her body had nipples, eyes

  a tongue and other parts

  mirthful

  obscene

  which rose from lovequite often

  hilarious into daylight

  even forgetting why

  iv

  When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking

  into the long history they were made for running

  caught the train you missed sought you eye-level

  at the next stationYou having run the whole way

  to seize my face between your handsyour kind

  of victory or benedictionthen

  we swerved down-tunnel


  in separate carsWhat is it to

  catch yourself mirror-twinned

  in an underwater windowwhat

  about speedmatching

  technology and desiregetting off

  at the last stop:dispersed

  v

  You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog

  ocean in its shaking

  looks back at you with a blurred eye

  Who’s that reflected

  naked and sundered

  reaching a hand

  Go

  down to the beach, walk in the wind

  Pick up the washed-in shell

  at your foot

  Shell castle built on sand

  your body and what’s your soul?

  Is there a ghost-in-waiting?

  time to bring that one in

  2006

  THE UNIVERSITY REOPENS AS THE FLOODS RECEDE