Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  no dust upon the furniture of love.

  Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,

  the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,

  a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat

  stalking the picturesque amusing mouse

  had risen at his urging.

  Not that at five each separate stair would writhe

  under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light

  so coldly would delineate the scraps

  of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles;

  that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers

  a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own—

  envoy from some village in the moldings …

  Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,

  sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,

  declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,

  rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;

  while she, jeered by the minor demons,

  pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found

  a towel to dust the table-top,

  and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.

  By evening she was back in love again,

  though not so wholly but throughout the night

  she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming

  like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

  AUTUMN EQUINOX

  The leaves that shifted overhead all summer

  Are marked for earth now, and I bring the baskets

  Still dark with clingings of another season

  Up from the cellar. All the house is still,

  Now that I’ve left it. Lyman in his study

  Peers on a page of Dryden by the window,

  Eyes alone moving, like a mended quaint

  Piece of old clockwork. When the afternoon

  Trails into half-light, he will never notice

  Until I come indoors to light the lamps

  And rouse him blinking from the brownish type,

  The gilt and tarnished spine of volume five

  Out of the glass-doored cabinet in the hall.

  Why Satires, I have wondered? For I’ve seen

  The title-page, and riffled through the volume,

  When he was gone. I thought that growing old

  Returned one to a vague Arcadian longing,

  To Ovid, Spenser, something golden-aged,

  Some incorruptible myth that tinged the years

  With pastoral flavours. Lyman, too, as gentle

  As an old shepherd, half-apologetic

  When I come bustling to disturb his dreams—

  What in that bitterness can speak to him

  Or help him down these final sloping decades

  With kindly arm? I’ve never been a scholar—

  Reader, perhaps at times, but not a scholar,

  Not in the way that Lyman used to be—

  And yet I know there’s acid on the page

  He pores—that least acidulous of men.

  While I, who spent my youth and middle-age

  In stubbornness and railing, pass the time

  Now, after fifty, raking in the sun

  The leaves that sprinkle slowly on the grass,

  And feel their gold like firelight at my back,

  In slow preoccupation with September.

  Sometimes I call across to Alice Hume

  And meet her at the fence as women meet

  To say the weather’s seasonably fine,

  Talk husbands, bargains, or philosophize—

  The dry philosophy of neighborhood.

  She thinks perhaps how sharp of tongue and quick

  I used to be, and how I’ve quieted down,

  Without those airs because I’d married Lyman,

  Professor at the college, while her husband

  Was just another farmer. That was pride

  As raw and silly as the girl I was—

  Reading too much, sneering at other girls

  Whose learning was of cookery and flirtation.

  Father would have me clever, sometimes said

  He’d let me train for medicine, like a son,

  To come into his practice. So I studied

  German and botany, and hated both.

  What good for me to know the Latin name

  For huckleberry, while the others climbed

  To pick the fruit and kissed across the bushes?

  I never was a scholar, but I had

  A woman’s love for men of intellect,

  A woman’s need for love of any kind.

  So Lyman came to ask me of my father:

  Stiff-collared, shy, not quite the man I’d dreamed—

  (Byron and Matthew Arnold vaguely mingled

  Without the disadvantages of either.)

  And yet he seemed superb in his refusal

  To read aloud from Bryant to the ladies

  Assembled on the boarding-house piazza

  Among the moth-wings of a summer evening.

  His quick withdrawal won my heart. I smile

  Sometimes to think what quirks of vanity

  Propel us toward our choices in the end.

  The wedding-picture in the bureau drawer

  Has on the back in Lyman’s measured writing:

  “September twenty-second, nineteen-twelve.”

  I keep it in its folder, deckle-edged

  And yellowing. I see myself again,

  Correct and terrified on our wedding-day,

  Wearing the lace my mother wore before me

  And buttoned shoes that pinched. I feel again

  The trembling of my hand in Lyman’s fingers,

  Awkwardly held in that ungainly pose

  While aunts around us nodded like the Fates

  That nemesis was accomplished. Lyman stood

  So thin and ministerial in his black,

  I thought he looked a stranger. In the picture

  We are the semblance of a bride and groom

  Static as figures on a mantelpiece,

  As if that moment out of time existed

  Then and forever in a dome of glass,

  Where neither dust nor the exploring fly

  Could speck its dry immutability.

  Thus I became his partner in a life

  Annual, academic; we observed

  Events momentous as the ceremony

  To dedicate the chapel carillon

  (Memorial to Edward Stephens Hodge,

  Class of nineteen-fourteen). There we heard

  Those sounds converge upon the rural air

  That soon became familiar as a hinge

  Creaking and never silenced. In our meadow

  The angular young took up their bats and shouted

  Throughout the afternoon, while I was pouring

  Tea for the dean’s arthritic wife. For Lyman

  The world was all the distance he pursued

  From home to lecture-room, and home again,

  Exchanging nods with colleagues, smiling vaguely

  Upon a shirtsleeved trio, tanned and jostling,

  Who grinned and gave him room upon the path.

  I bit my fingers, changed the parlor curtains

  To ones the like of which were never seen

  Along our grave and academic street.

  I brought them home from Springfield in a bundle

  And hung them in defiance. I took a walk

  Across the fields one heavy summer night

  Until the college from a mile away

  Looked sallow, insignificant in the moonlight.

  It seemed the moon must shine on finer things

  I had not seen, things that could show with pride

  Beneath that silver globe. Along the walls

  Of Lyman’s study there were steel engravings

  Framed in black oak: the crazy tower of Pisa,

  The Pyramids, rooted in desert sand,

  Cologne Cathedral with its dangerous spires

  Piercing the
atmosphere. I hated them

  For priggishly enclosing in a room

  The marvels of the world, as if declaring

  Such was the right and fitting rôle of marvels.

  Night, and I wept aloud; half in my sleep,

  Half feeling Lyman’s wonder as he leaned

  Above to shake me. “Are you ill, unhappy?

  Tell me what I can do.”

  “I’m sick, I guess—

  I thought that life was different than it is.”

  “Tell me what’s wrong. Why can’t you ever say?

  I’m here, you know.”

  Half shamed, I turned to see

  The lines of grievous love upon his face,

  The love that gropes and cannot understand.

  “I must be crazy, Lyman—or a dream

  Has made me babble things I never thought.

  Go back to sleep—I won’t be so again.”

  Young lovers talk of giving all the heart

  Into each others’ trust: their rhetoric

  Won’t stand for analyzing, I’m aware,

  But have they thought of this: that each must know

  Beyond a doubt what’s given, what received?

  Now we are old like Nature; patient, staid,

  Unhurried from the year’s wellworn routine,

  We wake and take the day for what it is,

  And sleep as calmly as the dead who know

  They’ll wake to their reward. We have become

  As unselfconscious as a pair of trees,

  Not questioning, but living. Even autumn

  Can only carry through what spring began.

  What else could happen now but loss of leaf

  And rain upon the boughs? So I have thought,

  And wondered faintly where the thought began,

  And when the irritable gust of youth

  Stopped turning every blade of grass to find

  A new dissatisfaction. Meanwhile Lyman

  Reads satire in the falling afternoon—

  A change for him as well. We finish off

  Not quite as we began. I hear the bells

  Wandering through the air across the fields.

  I’ve raked three bushel baskets full of leaves—

  Enough for one September afternoon.

  THE STRAYED VILLAGE

  He had come nearly half a thousand miles,

  And then to find it gone … He knew too well

  Ever to be mistaken, where the hills

  Dipped to reveal it first: the line of chimneys

  Reflected in the unimportant stream,

  The monument, worth half a line in guidebooks—

  “Tower of a church that Cromwell’s army burned,

  Fine early Perpendicular”—itself

  Subservient neither to theologies

  Nor changing styles of architecture, still

  A cipher on the landscape, something clear

  In that unostentatious scenery.

  Well, if the tower was gone—and who should say,

  Depend on any landmark to remain?

  He had been too far and known too many losses

  Not to be reconciled that even landmarks

  Go out like matches when you need them most.

  So it could be with this. But not a house,

  Not anything reflected in the river

  But willows that could grow by any river,

  Feminine, non-committal in their postures.

  Willows: a bridge then? But the bridge was gone,

  The piles had left no trace, no signature

  Of stones beside the water. If, indeed,

  There ever had been bridge or tower or house.

  That was the question that enforeigned him,

  Brushed forty years of memory aside

  And made of him another obtuse tripper

  Staring at signposts to be reassured:

  This is the place—where I grew into manhood,

  The place I had to leave when I was grown?

  So often he had thought a man’s whole life

  Most rightly could be written, like his own,

  In terms of places he was forced to leave

  Because their meaning, passing that of persons,

  Became too much for him.

  “This is the place?”

  He heard himself demand; and heard the other—

  A youthful rector, by the look of him,

  Pausing upon his evening stroll—reply,

  “Oh, yes, this is the place…. The village went,

  As I should reckon, twenty years ago.

  Across the hill, in our town, there was once

  Talk and conjecture; now you might suppose

  Only the antiquarians breathe its name.

  The memory of man, my friend, is short.”

  “Shorter and longer than it’s credited,”

  He answered; “but you say the village went?

  I hardly care to ask, and yet I ask—

  By flood? by fire? There used to be a tower

  That Cromwell’s zealots failed to bully down.

  But there’s no mark. It went? How did it go?”

  “It went away. You’ve heard of men who went,

  Suddenly, without partings or annulments,

  Not carried off by accident or death,

  But simply strayed? That was the way it went.

  We went to bed on Thursday and could hear

  The bells, as usual on a quiet night,

  Across the hill between. On Friday morning

  There were no bells. There wasn’t anything.

  The landscape stood as if since Magna Carta,

  Empty, as it stands now. The village had gone,

  Quite without taking leave. Strayed, is the word

  We found ourselves as if by acquiescence

  Using to speak of it, as if we thought

  Someday to come upon it somewhere else

  And greet our former neighbors as before.

  No one has ever found it, though. One can’t

  Advertise for a village that has strayed:

  ‘Lost, with one early Perpendicular tower,

  A village numbering four hundred souls,

  With stone and wooden footbridge.’ And, as I say,

  Men’s memories grow short like winter daylight.

  So much gets strayed that has to be replaced—

  Dogs, wits, affections …”

  “Yes, so much gets strayed;

  But one of all the things a man can lose

  I thought would keep till I could come again.

  It almost seems it went lest I should come,

  Because I always promised I would come,

  And had this latest penalty in store,

  The last of losses.”

  So he said goodbye,

  And watched the little rector climb the hill

  Back to his parish town. The stream ran on,

  And all that walking was to do again.

  THE PERENNIAL ANSWER

  The way the world came swinging round my ears

  I knew what Doctor meant the day he said,

  “Take care, unless you want to join your dead;

  It’s time to end this battling with your years.”

  He knew I’d have the blackest word told straight,

  Whether it was my child that couldn’t live,

  Or Joel’s mind, thick-riddled like a sieve

  With all that loving festered into hate.

  Better to know the ways you are accurst,

  And stand up fierce and glad to hear the worst.

  The blood is charged, the back is stiffened so.

  Well, on that day that was a day ago,

  And yet so many hours and years ago

  Numbered in seizures of a darkening brain,

  I started up the attic stairs again—

  The fifth time in the hour—not thinking then

  That it was hot, but knowing the air sat stiller

  Und
er the eaves than when the idiot killer

  Hid in the Matthews barn among the hay

  And all the neighbors through one August day

  Waited outside with pitchforks in the sun.

  Joel waited too, and when they heard the gun

  Resound so flatly in the loft above

  He was the one to give the door a shove

  And climb the ladder. A man not made for love,

  But built for things of violence; he would stand

  Where lightning flashed and watch with eyes so wide

  You thought the prongs of fire would strike inside;

  Or sit with some decaying book in hand,

  Reading of spirits and the evil-eyed,

  And witches’ Sabbaths in a poisoned land.

  So it was Joel that brought the fellow out,

  Tarnished with hay and blood. I still can see

  The eyes that Joel turned and fixed on me

  When it was done—as if by rights his wife

  Should go to him for having risked his life

  And say—I hardly knew what thing he wanted.

  I know it was a thing I never granted,

  And what his mind became, from all that woe,

  Those violent concerns he lived among,

  Was on my head as well. I couldn’t go,

  I never went to him, I never clung

  One moment on his breast. But I was young.

  And I was cruel, a girl-bride seeing only

  Her marriage as a room so strange and lonely

  She looked outside for warmth. And in what fashion

  Could I be vessel for that somber passion—

  For Joel, decreed till death to have me all?

  The tortured grandsire hanging in the hall

  Depicted by a limner’s crabbed hand

  Seemed more a being that I could understand.

  How could I help but look beyond that wall

  And probe the lawful stones that built it strong

  With questions sharper than a pitchfork’s prong?

  If Joel knew, he kept his silence long.

  But Evans and I were hopeless from the start:

  He, collared early by a rigorous creed,

  Not man of men but man of God indeed,

  Whose eye had seen damnation, and whose heart

  Thrust all it knew of passion into one

  Chamber of iron inscribed Thy will be done.

  Yet sense will have revenge on one who tries

  To down his senses with the brand of lies.

  The road was empty from the village home,

  Empty of all but us and that dark third,

  The sudden Northern spring. There must be some