Later Poems Selected and New

by Adrienne Rich

  5

  There’s a young cat sticking

  her head through window bars

  she’s hungry like us

  but can feed on mice

  her bronze erupting fur

  speaks of a life already wild

  her golden eyes

  don’t give quarter She’ll teach us Let’s call her

  Sister

  when we get milk we’ll give her some

  6

  I’ve told you, let’s try to sleep in this funny camp

  All night pitiless pilotless things go shrieking

  above us to somewhere

  Don’t let your faces turn to stone

  Don’t stop asking me why

  Let’s pay attention to our cat she needs us

  Maybe tomorrow the bakers can fix their ovens

  7

  “We sang them to naps told stories made

  shadow-animals with our hands

  wiped human debris off boots and coats

  sat learning by heart the names

  some were too young to write

  some had forgotten how”

  2001

  This Evening Let’s

  not talk

  about my country How

  I’m from an optimistic culture

  that speaks louder than my passport

  Don’t double-agent-contra my

  invincible innocence I’ve

  got my own

  suspicions Let’s

  order retsina

  cracked olives and bread

  I’ve got questions of my own but

  let’s give a little

  let’s let a little be

  If friendship is not a tragedy

  if it’s a mercy

  we can be merciful

  if it’s just escape

  we’re neither of us running

  why otherwise be here

  Too many reasons not

  to waste a rainy evening

  in a backroom of bouzouki

  and kitchen Greek

  I’ve got questions of my own but

  let’s let it be a little

  There’s a beat in my head

  song of my country

  called Happiness, U.S.A.

  Drowns out bouzouki

  drowns out world and fusion

  with its Get—get—get

  into your happiness before

  happiness pulls away

  hangs a left along the piney shore

  weaves a hand at you—“one I adore”—

  Don’t be proud, run hard for that

  enchantment boat

  tear up the shore if you must but

  get into your happiness because

  before

  and otherwise

  it’s going to pull away

  So tell me later

  what I know already

  and what I don’t get

  yet save for another day

  Tell me this time

  what you are going through

  travelling the Metropolitan

  Express

  break out of that style

  give me your smile

  awhile

  2001

  There Is No One Story and One Story Only

  The engineer’s story of hauling coal

  to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs

  between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete

  back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows

  in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years

  The flight attendant’s story murmured

  to the flight steward in the dark galley

  of her fifth-month loss of nerve

  about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen

  The story of the forensic medical team’s

  small plane landing on an Alaska icefield

  of the body in the bag they had to drag

  over the ice like the whole life of that body

  The story of the man driving

  600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming

  easy when leaving but afterward

  writing in a letter difficult truths

  Of the friend watching him leave remembering

  the story of her body

  with his once and the stories of their children

  made with other people and how his mind went on

  pressing hers like a body

  There is the story of the mind’s

  temperature neither cold nor celibate

  Ardent The story of

  not one thing only.

  2002

  Usonian Journals 2000

  [Usonian: the term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired architecture. Here, of the United States of North America.]

  Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare

  A country I was born and lived in undergoes rapid and flagrant change. I return here as a stranger. In fact I’ve lived here all along. At a certain point I realized I was no longer connected along any continuous strand to the nature of the change. I can’t find my passport. Nobody asks me to show it.

  Day/Job/Mare

  . . . to lunch with K., USonian but recently from a British university. Described as “our Marxist.” Dark and pretty, already she’s got half the department classified: She’s crazy . . . He’s carrying the chip of race on his shoulder . . . she’s here because he is, isn’t she? . . . He’s not likely to make it through . . . Ask her about current Brit. labor scene; she talks about the influence of the industrial revolution on Victorian prose. My aim: get clear of this, find another day job.

  As we left the dark publike restaurant the street—ordinary enough couple of blocks between a parking lot and an office complex—broke into spitting, popping sounds and sudden running. I held back against the wall, she beside me. Something happened then everything. A man’s voice screamed, then whined: a police siren starting up seemed miles away but then right there. I didn’t see any blood. We ran in different directions, she toward, I away from, the police.

  Document Window

  Could I just show what’s happening. Not that shooting, civil disturbance, whatever it was. I’d like you to see how differently we’re all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter, how quickly things and people get replaced. How interchangeable it all could get to seem. Could get to seem . . . the kind of phrase we use now, avoiding the verb to be. There’s a sense in which, we say, dismissing other senses.

  Rimbaud called for the rational derangement of all the senses in the name of poetry. Marx: capitalism deranges all the senses save the sense of property.

  Keeping my back against unimportant walls I moved out of range of the confusion, away from the protection of the police. Having seen nothing I could swear to I felt at peace with my default. I would, at least, not be engaged in some mess not my own.

  This is what I mean though: how differently we move now, rapidly deciding what is and isn’t ours. Indifferently.

  Voices

  Wreathed around the entrance to a shopping mall, a student dining hall, don’t pause for a word, or to articulate an idea. What hangs a moment in the air is already dead: That’s history.

  The moment—Edwin Denby describes it—when a dancer, leaping, stands still in the air. Pause in conversation when time would stop, an idea hang suspended, then get taken up and carried on. (Then that other great style of conversation: everyone at once, each possessed with an idea.) This newer conversation: I am here and talking, talking, here and talking . . . Television the first great lesson: against silence. “I thought she’d never call and I went aaah! to my friend and she went give it a week, she’ll call you all right and you did”—“ And you went waowh! and I went, right, I went O.K., it’s only I was clueless? so now can we grab something nearby, cause I’m due on in forty-five?”

  A neighbor painting his garage yelling in cell phone from the driveway: voice that penetrates kitchen-
window glass. “Fucking worst day of my fucking life, fucking wife left me for another man, both on coke and, you know? I don’t CARE! thought it was only maryjane she was, do you KNOW the prison term for coke? Fucking dealer, leaves me for him because she’s HOOKED and I’m supposed to CARE? Do they know what they’ll GET?”

  Private urgencies made public, not collective, speaker within a bubble. In the new restaurant: “Marty? Thought I’d never get through to you. We need to move quickly with SZ-02, there are hounds on the trail. Barney won’t block you at all. Just give him what we talked about.”

  USonian speech. Men of the upwardly mobilizing class needing to sound boyish, an asset in all the newness of the new: upstart, startup, adventurist, pirate lad’s nasal bravado in the male vocal cords. Voices of girls and women screeking to an excitable edge of brightness. In an excessively powerful country, grown women sound like girls without authority or experience. Male, female voices alike pitched fastforward commercial, one timbre, tempo, intonation.

  Mirrors

  Possible tones of the human voice, their own possible physical beauty—no recognition. The fish-eye lens bobbles faces back.

  Bodies heavy with sad or enraged feminine or macho brooding mimic stand–up comics, celebrities; grimace, gesticulate. The nakedest generation of young USonians with little intuition of the human history of nakedness, luminous inventions of skin and musculature. Their surfaces needlepointed with conventionally outrageous emblems, what mirror to render justly their original beauty back to them?

  You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you.

  Artworks (I)

  Painting on a gallery wall: people dwelling on opposite sides of a pane of glass. None of their eyes exchanging looks. Yellow flashes off the rug in the room and from the orchard beyond Houses of people whose eyes do not meet.

  White people doing and seeing no evil.

  (Photograph of family reunion, eyes on the wide-lens camera unmeeting.) “In fact I’ve lived here all along.”

  That was them not us. We were at the time in the time of our displacement, being torn from a false integrity. We stared at the pictures in the gallery knowing they were not us, we were being driven further for something else and who knew how far and for how long and what we were to do.

  Stranger

  Isolation begins to form, moves in like fog on a clear afternoon. Arrives with the mail, leaves its messages on the phone machine. If you hadn’t undergone this so often it could take you by surprise, but its rime-white structure is the simple blueprint of your displacement. You: who pride yourself on not giving in, keep discovering in dreams new rooms in an old house, drawing new plans: living with strangers, enough for all, wild tomato plants along the road, redness for hunger and thirst. (Unrest, too, in the house of dreams: the underworld lashing back.)

  But this fog blanks echoes, blots reciprocal sounds. The padded cell of a moribund democracy, or just your individual case?

  Artworks (II)

  Early summer lunch with friends, talk rises: poetry, urban design and planning, film. Strands of interest and affection binding us differently around the table. If an uneasy political theme rears up—the meaning of a show of lynching photographs in New York, after Mapplethorpe’s photos, of sociopathic evil inside the California prison industry—talk fades. Not a pause but: a suppression. No one is monitoring this conversation but us. We know the air is bad in here, maybe want not to push that knowledge, ask what is to be done? How to breathe? What will suffice? Draft new structures or simply be aware? If art is our only resistance, what does that make us? If we’re collaborators, what’s our offering to corruption—an aesthetic, anaesthetic, dye of silence, withdrawal, intellectual disgust?

  This fade-out/suspension of conversation: a syndrome of the past decades? our companionate immune systems under siege, viral spread of social impotence producing social silence?

  Imagine written language that walks away from human conversation. A written literature, back turned to oral traditions, estranged from music and body. So what might reanimate, rearticulate, becomes less and less available.

  Incline

  Dreamroad rising steeply uphill; David is driving. I see it turning into a perpendicular structure salvaged from a long metal billboard: we will have to traverse this at a ninety-degree angle, then at the top go over and down the other side. There are no exits. Around is the Mojave Desert: open space. D.’s car begins to lose momentum as the incline increases; he tries shifting into a lower gear and gunning the engine. There is no way off this incline now, we’re forced into a situation we hadn’t reckoned on—a road now become something that is no road, something designated as “commercial space.” I suggest rolling (ourselves in) the car down the steep dusty shoulder into the desert below, and out. For both of us, the desert isn’t vacancy or fear, its life, a million forms of witness. The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon.

  Mission Statement

  The Organization for the Abolition of Cruelty has an air deployment with bases on every continent and on obscurer tracts of land. Airstrips and hangars have been constructed to accommodate large and small aircraft for reconnoiter and rescue missions whether on polar ice or in desert or rainforest conditions. Many types of craft are of course deployed to urban clusters. The mission of the Organization is not to the First, Third, or any other World. It is directed toward the investigation and abrogation of cruelty in every direction, including present and future extraterrestrial locations.

  It is obvious that the destruction of despair is still our most urgent task. In this regard, we employ paramilitary methods with great care and watchfulness.

  The personnel dedicated to this new program are responsible to the mission, not to any national body. We are apprised of all new technologies as soon as available. Hence we have a unique fusion of policy and technology, unique in that its purpose is the abolition of cruelty.

  Ours is the first project of its kind to be fully empowered through the new paranational charters. In principle, it is now recognized that both agents and objects of cruelty must be rescued and transformed, and that they sometimes merge into each other.

  In response to your inquiry: this is a complex operation. We have a wide range of specializations and concerns. Some are especially calibrated toward language

  because of its known and unknown powers

  to bind and to dissociate

  because of its capacity

  to ostracize the speechless

  because of its capacity

  to nourish self-deception

  because of its capacity

  for rebirth and subversion

  because of the history

  of torture

  against human speech

  2000–2002

  Transparencies

  That the meek word like the righteous word can bully

  that an Israeli soldier interviewed years

  after the first Intifada could mourn on camera

  what under orders he did, saw done, did not refuse

  that another leaving Beit Jala could scrawl

  on a wall: We are truely sorry for the mess we made

  is merely routine word that would cancel deed

  That human equals innocent and guilty

  That we grasp for innocence whether or no

  is elementary That words can translate into broken bones

  That the power to hurl words is a weapon

  That the body can be a weapon

  any child on playground knows That asked your favorite word

  in a game

  you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river

  (never a pronoun never God or War)

  is taken for granted That word and body

  are all we have to lay on the line

  That words are windowpanes in a ransacked hut, smeared

  by time’s dirty rains, we might argue

  likewise that words are clear as glass till the sun strikes it blinding


  But that in a dark windowpane you have seen your face

  That when you wipe your glasses the text grows clearer

  That the sound of crunching glass comes at the height of the

  wedding

  That I can look through glass

  into my neighbor’s house

  but not my neighbor’s life

  That glass is sometimes broken to save lives

  That a word can be crushed like a goblet underfoot

  is only what it seems, part question, part answer: how

  you live it

  2002

  Ritual Acts

  i

  We are asking for books

  No, not—but a list of books

  to be given to young people

  Well, to young poets

  to guide them in their work

  He gestures impatiently

  They won’t read he says

  My time is precious

  If they want to they’ll find

  whatever they need

  I’m going for a walk after lunch

  After that I lie down

  Then and only then do I read the papers

  Mornings are for work

  the proofs of the second volume

  —my trilogy, and he nods

  And we too nod recognition

  ii

  The buses—packed

  since the subways are forbidden

  and the highways forsaken

  so people bring everything on—

  what they can’t do without—

  Air conditioners, sculpture

  Double baskets of babies

  Fruit platters, crematory urns

  Sacks of laundry, of books

  Inflated hearts, bass fiddles

  Bridal gowns in plastic bags

  Pet iguanas, oxygen tanks

  The tablets of Moses

  iii

  After all—to have loved, wasn’t that the object?

  Love is the only thing in life

  but then you can love too much

  or the wrong way, you lose

  yourself or you lose

  the person

  or you strangle each other

  Maybe the object of love is

  to have loved

  greatly

  at one time or another

  Like a cinema trailer

  watched long ago

  iv

  You need to turn yourself around