Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  —PABLO CONRAD

  A CHANGE

  OF WORLD

  (1951)

  For Theodore Morrison

  STORM WARNINGS

  The glass has been falling all the afternoon,

  And knowing better than the instrument

  What winds are walking overhead, what zone

  Of gray unrest is moving across the land,

  I leave the book upon a pillowed chair

  And walk from window to closed window, watching

  Boughs strain against the sky

  And think again, as often when the air

  Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,

  How with a single purpose time has traveled

  By secret currents of the undiscerned

  Into this polar realm. Weather abroad

  And weather in the heart alike come on

  Regardless of prediction.

  Between foreseeing and averting change

  Lies all the mastery of elements

  Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.

  Time in the hand is not control of time,

  Nor shattered fragments of an instrument

  A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,

  We can only close the shutters.

  I draw the curtains as the sky goes black

  And set a match to candles sheathed in glass

  Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine

  Of weather through the unsealed aperture.

  This is our sole defense against the season;

  These are the things that we have learned to do

  Who live in troubled regions.

  AUNT JENNIFER’S TIGERS

  Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,

  Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

  They do not fear the men beneath the tree;

  They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

  Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool

  Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.

  The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band

  Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

  When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

  Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

  The tigers in the panel that she made

  Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

  VERTIGO

  As for me, I distrust the commonplace;

  Demand and am receiving marvels, signs,

  Miracles wrought in air, acted in space

  After imagination’s own designs.

  The lion and the tiger pace this way

  As often as I call; the flight of wings

  Surprises empty air, while out of clay

  The golden-gourded vine unwatered springs.

  I have inhaled impossibility,

  And walk at such an angle, all the stars

  Have hung their carnival chains of light for me:

  There is a streetcar runs from here to Mars.

  I shall be seeing you, my darling, there,

  Or at the burning bush in Harvard Square.

  THE ULTIMATE ACT

  What if the world’s corruption nears,

  The consequence they dare not name?

  We shall but realize our fears

  And having tasted them go on,

  Neither from hope of grace nor fame,

  Delivered from remorse and shame,

  And do the things left to be done

  For no sake other than their own.

  The quarry shall be stalked and won,

  The bed invaded, and the game

  Played till the roof comes tumbling down

  And win or lose are all the same.

  Action at such a pitch shall flame

  Only beneath a final sun.

  WHAT GHOSTS CAN SAY

  When Harry Wylie saw his father’s ghost,

  As bearded and immense as once in life,

  Bending above his bed long after midnight,

  He screamed and gripped the corner of the pillow

  Till aunts came hurrying white in dressing gowns

  To say it was a dream. He knew they lied.

  The smell of his father’s leather riding crop

  And stale tobacco stayed to prove it to him.

  Why should there stay such tokens of a ghost

  If not to prove it came on serious business?

  His father always had meant serious business,

  But never so wholly in his look and gesture

  As when he beat the boy’s uncovered thighs

  Calmly and resolutely, at an hour

  When Harry never had been awake before.

  The man who could choose that single hour of night

  Had in him the ingredients of a ghost;

  Mortality would quail at such a man.

  An older Harry lost his childish notion

  And only sometimes wondered if events

  Could echo thus long after in a dream.

  If so, it surely meant they had a meaning.

  But why the actual punishment had fallen,

  For what offense of boyhood, he could try

  For years and not unearth. What ghosts can say—

  Even the ghosts of fathers—comes obscurely.

  What if the terror stays without the meaning?

  THE KURSAAL AT INTERLAKEN

  Here among tables lit with bottled tapers

  The violins are tuning for the evening

  Against the measured “Faites vos jeux,” the murmur,

  Rising and falling, from the gaming rooms.

  The waiters skim beneath the ornate rafters

  Where lanterns swing like tissue-paper bubbles.

  The tables fill, the bottled candles drip,

  The gaming wheels spin in the long salon,

  And operetta waltzes gild the air

  With the capricious lilt of costume music.

  You will perhaps make love to me this evening,

  Dancing among the circular green tables

  Or where the clockwork tinkle of the fountain

  Sounds in the garden’s primly pebbled arbors.

  Reality is no stronger than a waltz,

  A painted lake stippled with boats and swans,

  A glass of gold-brown beer, a phrase in German

  Or French, or any language but our own.

  Reality would call us less than friends,

  And therefore more adept at making love.

  What is the world, the violins seem to say,

  But windows full of bears and music boxes,

  Chocolate gnomes and water-color mountains,

  And calendars of French and German days—

  Sonntag and vendredi, unreal dimensions,

  Days where we speak all languages but our own?

  So in this evening of a mythical summer

  We shall believe all flowers are edelweiss,

  All bears hand-carved, all kisses out of time,

  Caught in the spinning vertigo of a waltz.

  The fringe of foam clings lacelike to your glass,

  And now that midnight draws with Swiss perfection

  The clock’s two hands into a single gesture,

  Shall we pursue this mood into the night,

  Play this charade out in the silver street

  Where moonlight pours a theme by Berlioz?

  If far from breath of ours, indifferent, frozen,

  The mountain like a sword against the night

  Catches a colder silver, draws our sight,

  What is she but a local tour de force?

  The air is bright with after-images.

  The lanterns and the twinkling glasses dwindle,

  The waltzes and the croupiers’ voices crumble,

  The evening folds like a kaleidoscope.

  Against the splinters of a reeling landscape

  This image still pursues us into time:

  Jungfrau, the legendary virgin
spire,

  Consumes the mind with mingled snow and fire.

  RELIQUARY

  The bones of saints are praised above their flesh,

  That pale rejected garment of their lives

  In which they walked despised, uncanonized.

  Brooding upon the marble bones of time

  Men read strange sanctity in lost events,

  Hold requiem mass for murdered yesterdays,

  And in the dust of actions once reviled

  Find symbols traced, and freeze them into stone.

  PURELY LOCAL

  Beside this door a January tree

  Answers a few days’ warmth with shoots of green;

  And knowing what the winds must do, I see

  A hint of something human in the scene.

  No matter how the almanacs have said

  Hold back, distrust a purely local May,

  When did we ever learn to be afraid?

  Why are we scarred with winter’s thrust today?

  A VIEW OF THE TERRACE

  Under the green umbrellas

  Drinking golden tea,

  There sit the porcelain people

  Who care for you but little

  And not at all for me.

  The afternoon in crinkles

  Lies stiffly on the lawn

  And we, two furtive exiles,

  Watch from an upper window

  With shutters not quite drawn.

  The gilt and scalloped laughter

  Reaches us through a glaze,

  And almost we imagine

  That if we threw a pebble

  The shining scene would craze.

  But stones are thrown by children,

  And we by now too wise

  To try again to splinter

  The bright enamel people

  Impervious to surprise.

  BY NO MEANS NATIVE

  “Yonder,” they told him, “things are not the same.”

  He found it understated when he came.

  His tongue, in hopes to find itself at home,

  Caught up the twist of every idiom.

  He learned the accent and the turn of phrase,

  Studied like Latin texts the local ways.

  He tasted till his palate knew their shape

  The country’s proudest bean, its master grape.

  He never talked of fields remembered green,

  Or seasons in his land of origin.

  And still he felt there lay a bridgeless space

  Between himself and natives of the place.

  Their laughter came when his had long abated;

  He struggled in allusions never stated.

  The truth at last cried out to be confessed:

  He must remain eternally a guest,

  Never to wear the birthmark of their ways.

  He could be studying native all his days

  And die a kind of minor alien still.

  He might deceive himself by force of will,

  Feel all the sentiments and give the sign,

  Yet never overstep that tenuous line.

  What else then? Wear the old identity,

  The mark of other birth, and when you die,

  Die as an exile? it has done for some.

  Others surrender, book their passage home,

  Only to seek their exile soon again,

  No greater strangers than their countrymen.

  Yet man will have his bondage to some place;

  If not, he seeks an Order, or a race.

  Some join the Masons, some embrace the Church,

  And if they do, it does not matter much.

  As for himself, he joined the band of those

  Who pick their fruit no matter where it grows,

  And learn to like it sweet or like it sour

  Depending on the orchard or the hour.

  By no means native, yet somewhat in love

  With things a native is enamored of—

  Except the sense of being held and owned

  By one ancestral patch of local ground.

  AIR WITHOUT INCENSE

  We eat this body and remain ourselves.

  We drink this liquor, tasting wine, not blood.

  Among these triple icons, rites of seven,

  We know the feast to be of earth, not heaven:

  Here man is wounded, yet we speak of God.

  More than the Nazarene with him was laid

  Into the tomb, and in the tomb has stayed.

  Communion of no saints, mass without bell,

  Air without incense, we implore at need.

  There are questions to be answered, and the sky

  Answers no questions, hears no litany.

  We breathe the vapors of a sickened creed.

  Ours are assassins deadlier than sin;

  Deeper disorders starve the soul within.

  If any writ could tell us, we would read.

  If any ghost dared lay on us a claim,

  Our fibers would respond, our nerves obey;

  But revelation moves apart today

  From gestures of a tired pontifical game.

  We seek, where lamp and kyrie expire,

  A site unscourged by wasting tongues of fire.

  FOR THE FELLING OF AN ELM IN THE HARVARD YARD

  They say the ground precisely swept

  No longer feeds with rich decay

  The roots enormous in their age

  That long and deep beneath have slept.

  So the great spire is overthrown,

  And sharp saws have gone hurtling through

  The rings that three slow centuries wore;

  The second oldest elm is down.

  The shade where James and Whitehead strolled

  Becomes a litter on the green.

  The young men pause along the paths

  To see the axes glinting bold.

  Watching the hewn trunk dragged away,

  Some turn the symbol to their own,

  And some admire the clean dispatch

  With which the aged elm came down.

  A CLOCK IN THE SQUARE

  This handless clock stares blindly from its tower,

  Refusing to acknowledge any hour.

  But what can one clock do to stop the game

  When others go on striking just the same?

  Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,

  Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,

  Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing

  From all the restless ways we must be going

  And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,

  Whether around a clockface or a world.

  WHY ELSE BUT TO FORESTALL THIS HOUR

  Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed

  Out of the noonday sun, kept from the rain,

  Swam only in familiar depths, and played

  No hand where caution signaled to refrain?

  For fourteen friends I walked behind the bier;

  A score of cousins wilted in my sight.

  I heard the steeples clang for each new year,

  Then drew my shutters close against the night.

  Bankruptcy fell on others like a dew;

  Spendthrifts of life, they all succumbed and fled.

  I did not chide them with the things I knew:

  Smiling, I passed the almshouse of the dead.

  I am the man who has outmisered death,

  In pains and cunning laid my seasons by.

  Now I must toil to win each hour and breath;

  I am too full of years to reason why.

  THIS BEAST, THIS ANGEL

  No: this, my love, is neither you nor I.

  This is the beast or angel, changing form,

  The will that we are scourged and nourished by.

  The golden fangs, the tall seraphic sword,

  Alike unsheathed, await the midnight cry,

  Blazon their answer to the stammered word.

  Beneath this gaze our powers are
fused as one;

  We meet these eyes under the curve of night.

  This is the transformation that is done

  Where mortal forces slay mortality

  And, towering at terrible full height,

  This beast, this angel is both you and I.

  EASTPORT TO BLOCK ISLAND

  Along the coastal waters, signals run

  In waves of caution and anxiety.

  We’ll try the catboat out another day.

  So Danny stands in sea-grass by the porch

  To watch a heeling dinghy, lone on grey,

  Grapple with moods of wind that take the bay.

  One year we walked among the shipwrecked shingles

  Of storm-crazed cottages along the dune.

  Rosa Morelli found her husband’s boat

  Ruined on the rocks; she never saw him dead,

  And after seven years of stubborn hope

  Began to curse the sight of things afloat.

  The mother of the Kennedy boys is out

  Stripping the Monday burden from the line

  And looking for a rowboat round the headland.

  Wonder if they stopped for bait at Mory’s

  And if the old man made them understand

  This is a day for boys to stay on land?

  Small craft, small craft, stay in and wait for tidings.

  The word comes in with every hour of wind.

  News of a local violence pricks the air,