Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  Drinks, tramples, immolates itself in action;

  The bloody light of braziers on the faces

  Of women who are action’s means and end,

  Each a laughing Fury; the towering glass

  Of those cathedral saints, whose stiffened forms,

  Ruby in passing torchlight, stoop to dark

  And flare again as puppets of disorder,

  Lifeless without its light, but in that rout

  Illumined and empowered. There’s no crowd

  In nave or playhouse any more; for all

  Are actors where mere pasteboard roars to heaven

  Under the dropped match, and the streets alone,

  The amphitheatre of great night itself,

  Suffice to contain their scene. Nothing will do

  But action of the senses, total seizure

  Of what’s to hand. And through the swaying streets

  That beggar, impotent since youth, sings on,

  Ignorant of the scene, blind to his power,

  The songs that send those lovers wild to bed.

  THE MIDDLE-AGED

  Their faces, safe as an interior

  Of Holland tiles and Oriental carpet,

  Where the fruit-bowl, always filled, stood in a light

  Of placid afternoon—their voices’ measure,

  Their figures moving in the Sunday garden

  To lay the tea outdoors or trim the borders,

  Afflicted, haunted us. For to be young

  Was always to live in other people’s houses

  Whose peace, if we sought it, had been made by others,

  Was ours at second-hand and not for long.

  The custom of the house, not ours, the sun

  Fading the silver-blue Fortuny curtains,

  The reminiscence of a Christmas party

  Of fourteen years ago—all memory,

  Signs of possession and of being possessed,

  We tasted, tense with envy. They were so kind,

  Would have given us anything; the bowl of fruit

  Was filled for us, there was a room upstairs

  We must call ours: but twenty years of living

  They could not give. Nor did they ever speak

  Of the coarse stain on that polished balustrade,

  The crack in the study window, or the letters

  Locked in a drawer and the key destroyed.

  All to be understood by us, returning

  Late, in our own time—how that peace was made,

  Upon what terms, with how much left unsaid.

  THE MARRIAGE PORTION

  From commissars of daylight

  Love cannot make us free.

  Nights of ungracious darkness

  Hang over you and me.

  We lie awake together

  And hear the clocks strike three.

  Our loving cannot exile

  The felons but and if;

  Yet being undivided

  Some ways we can contrive

  To hold off those besiegers

  Who batter round our life:

  The thieves of our completeness

  Who steal us stone by stone,

  The patronage that scowls upon

  Our need to be alone,

  And all the clever people

  Who want us for their own.

  The telephone is ringing,

  And planes and trains depart.

  The cocktail party’s forming,

  The cruise about to start.

  To stay behind is fatal—

  Act now, the time is short.

  If we refuse the summons

  And stand at last alone,

  We walk intact and certain,

  As man and woman grown

  In the deserted playground

  When all the rest have gone.

  THE TREE

  Long ago I found a seed,

  And kept it in a glass of water,

  And half forgot my dim intent

  Until I saw it start to reach

  For life with one blind, fragile root.

  And then I pressed it into earth

  And saw its tendrils seek the air,

  So slowly that I hardly knew

  Of any change till it had grown

  A stalk, a leaf; and seemed to be

  No more a thing in need of me,

  But living by some sapience

  I had not given, could not withdraw.

  So it grew on, and days went by,

  And seasons with their common gifts,

  Till at the leafage of the year

  I felt the sun cut off from me

  By something thick outside my room—

  Not yet a tree grown to the full,

  Yet so endowed with need and will

  It took the warmth and left me cold.

  And first I climbed with hook and shears

  To prune the boughs that darkened me,

  But the tree was stubborner than I,

  And where I clipped it grew again,

  Brutal in purpose as a weed.

  Nor did it give of fruit or flower,

  Though seasons brought their common gifts,

  And years went by. It only grew

  Darker and denser to my view,

  Taking whatever I would yield—

  The homage of a troubled mind—

  Requiring nothing, yet accepting

  My willingness to guard its life

  By the endurance of my own.

  It gives me nothing; yet I see

  Sometimes in dreams my enemy

  Hanged by the hair upon that tree.

  LOVERS ARE LIKE CHILDREN

  Chagall’s sweet lovers mounting into blue

  Remind me that discovery by two

  Of any world the mind can wander through

  Is like the time when young and left alone,

  We touched the secret fringe of being one,

  Back of the playground full of Everyone.

  Love is like childhood, caught in trust and fear.

  The statues point to omens in the air,

  And yet the fountains bubble bright and clear.

  Lost in the garden rank with contradiction,

  We see the fences sprout for our affliction,

  And the red-rose-tree curtly labelled Fiction.

  Nothing to tell us whether what they mean

  Is true of this or any other scene.

  We only know the summer leaves are green,

  Alive and dense for two to penetrate—

  An exploration difficult and great

  As when one day beside the schoolyard gate,

  Straggling behind to glean a sunlit stone,

  One first perceived and knew itself as one.

  Now add this pebble to that early one.

  WHEN THIS CLANGOR IN THE BRAIN

  Say a master of the track

  Lightly leaped and lightly ran,

  Knew his powers of chest and thigh

  Clean outstripped the thought of man—

  Would it not be pill and patch

  And worse than queasy cripples know,

  If on a day the rheum should catch

  And lay that master leaper low?

  Say that into certain minds

  A Merlin dances, in and out,

  And what he chooses, must obey

  And sway the thought it thinks about—

  Would it not be old folks’ home

  And the dry end of the year

  For the mind he left again

  Unmastered, lock and stock and gear?

  When this clangor in the brain

  Grows perfunctory, or worse,

  Put me down a sick old woman

  Propped for sleep, hire me a nurse;

  Till then, all things I look upon

  Beat on my brain to hail and bless,

  And every last and wayward power

  I claim till then, and nothing less.

  A VIEW OF MERTON COLLEGE

  An interval
: the view across the fields

  Perfect and insusceptible as seen

  In printshops of the High Street—sun on stone

  Worn like old needlework, the sheen of grass,

  Minute and ageless figures moving down

  The Broad Walk under tinted trees. Awhile

  Mind’s local jangling lightens, ear is eased,

  Eye’s flaw is mended in such gazing, healed

  By separation as through glass. Until

  Sun shifts, air turns harsher, paler, rooks

  Flap in the rising wind. The wind has found you,

  The mortal light of day, whose envy, waste,

  Irresolution tread you as you go

  Guilty and human. Here as anywhere,

  Peace of the mind lies through an arch of stone,

  The limitations posted strict and clear:

  Not to be littered or presumed upon.

  HOLIDAY

  Summer was another country, where the birds

  Woke us at dawn among the dripping leaves

  And lent to all our fêtes their sweet approval.

  The touch of air on flesh was lighter, keener,

  The senses flourished like a laden tree

  Whose every gesture finishes in a flower.

  In those unwardened provinces we dined

  From wicker baskets by a green canal,

  Staining our lips with peach and nectarine,

  Slapping at golden wasps. And when we kissed,

  Tasting that sunlit juice, the landscape folded

  Into our clasp, and not a breath recalled

  The long walk back to winter, leagues away.

  THE CAPITAL

  Under that summer asphalt, under vistas

  Aspiring to a neo-classic calm,

  The steaming burgeon of Potomac’s swamp

  Has never quite been laid to rest. The eye

  Winces in sunlight off a marble dome.

  But cannot fix the face of Jefferson

  Through haze of an outrageous atmosphere

  By diplomats called tropic; nor can the ear

  Hold to the lifeline of a single voice

  Through jettisoned rumors jamming all the air.

  The dollar in that city of inscriptions

  Is minted among pediments and columns

  Purer than newmade coin. The afternoon

  Steams with the drip of departmental fountains

  And humid branches breathing overhead

  Down avenues where the siren’s nervous shriek

  Pursues the murderer or the foreign guest

  Through those indifferent noonday crowds who never

  Ask, till history tells them, what they do

  In that metropolis anything but Greek.

  THE PLATFORM

  The railway stations of our daily plight

  See every hour love’s threatened overthrow.

  Each afternoon at five the buses go

  Laden with those who shall be false by night.

  We say goodbye in rooms too bright with noise

  To catch the shades of a receding voice;

  We turn at the revolving door and see

  Love’s face already changed, indelibly.

  Not to admit we may not meet again—

  This was the parting treason of our thought.

  Battering down our cowardly “till then,”

  Time’s traffic hems the seeker from the sought.

  We take too sudden leave; the platform reels

  With thunder of a thousand pounding heels,

  And at the gate where one remains behind,

  Though most we strain to see, we most are blind.

  Dear loves, dear friends, I take my leave all day

  In practice for a time that need not come.

  I turn and move from you a little way,

  As men walk out beyond the fields of home

  In troubled days, to view what they love well—

  Distance confirming for a moment’s spell,

  Meeting or going, that when we embrace

  We know the heart beyond the transient face.

  LAST SONG

  All in the day that I was born,

  I walked across the shouting corn;

  I saw the sunlight flash and hail

  From every spire and every sail,

  But most I leaned against the sky

  To hear the eagles racing by,

  And all the safety of the womb

  Could not betray me, lure me home.

  All in the day that I was wed

  I saw them strew my bridal bed.

  I smelled the wind across the sheets

  Breathing of lavender and sweets

  That neither sea nor meadow knew;

  And when my bride was brought to view

  I kept a hundred candles lit

  All for light and the joy of it.

  All in the day that I was old

  I felt the wind blow salt and cold

  Like seaspray on my shaking thighs

  Or sand flung up to blind my eyes.

  I cried for sun and the eagles flying,

  But felt those fingers spying, prying,

  The same that wrenched me into life

  And cut my safety with a knife.

  Soon they will bind me dark and warm

  And impotent to suffer harm.

  I shall be exiled to the womb

  Where once I lay and thought it home.

  The sun that flashed my first delight

  Shall never learn to cleave that night;

  And all the swords of danger fly

  Far from the caul in which I lie.

  THE DIAMOND CUTTERS

  However legendary,

  The stone is still a stone,

  Though it had once resisted

  The weight of Africa,

  The hammer-blows of time

  That wear to bits of rubble

  The mountain and the pebble—

  But not this coldest one.

  Now, you intelligence

  So late dredged up from dark

  Upon whose smoky walls

  Bison took fumbling form

  Or flint was edged on flint—

  Now, careful arriviste,

  Delineate at will

  Incisions in the ice.

  Be serious, because

  The stone may have contempt

  For too-familiar hands,

  And because all you do

  Loses or gains by this:

  Respect the adversary,

  Meet it with tools refined,

  And thereby set your price.

  Be hard of heart, because

  The stone must leave your hand.

  Although you liberate

  Pure and expensive fires

  Fit to enamor Shebas,

  Keep your desire apart.

  Love only what you do,

  And not what you have done.

  Be proud, when you have set

  The final spoke of flame

  In that prismatic wheel,

  And nothing’s left this day

  Except to see the sun

  Shine on the false and the true,

  And know that Africa

  Will yield you more to do.

  SNAPSHOTS

  OF A

  DAUGHTER-

  IN-LAW

  (1963)

  AT MAJORITY

  For C.

  When you are old and beautiful,

  And things most difficult are done,

  There will be few who can recall

  Your face that I see ravaged now

  By youth and its oppressive work.

  Your look will hold their wondering looks

  Grave as Cordelia’s at the last,

  Neither with rancor at the past

  Nor to upbraid the coming time.

  For you will be at peace with time.

  But now, a daily warfare takes

  Its toll of tenderness in you,

 
And you must live like captains who

  Wait out the hour before the charge—

  Fearful, and yet impatient too.

  Yet someday this will have an end,

  All choices made or choice resigned,

  And in your face the literal eye

  Trace little of your history,

  Nor ever piece the tale entire

  Of villages that had to burn

  And playgrounds of the will destroyed

  Before you could be safe from time

  And gather in your brow and air

  The stillness of antiquity.

  1954

  FROM MORNING-GLORY TO

  PETERSBURG

  (The World Book, 1928)

  “Organized knowledge in story and picture”

  confronts through dusty glass

  an eye grown dubious.

  I can recall when knowledge still was pure,

  not contradictory, pleasurable

  as cutting out a paper doll.

  You opened up a book and there it was:

  everything just as promised, from

  Kurdistan to Mormons, Gum

  Arabic to Kumquat, neither more nor less.

  Facts could be kept separate

  by a convention; that was what

  made childhood possible. Now knowledge finds me out;

  in all its risible untidiness

  it traces me to each address,

  dragging in things I never thought about.

  I don’t invite what facts can be

  held at arm’s length; a family

  of jeering irresponsibles always

  comes along gypsy-style

  and there you have them all

  forever on your hands. It never pays.

  If I could still extrapolate

  the morning-glory on the gate

  from Petersburg in history—but it’s too late.

  1954

  RURAL REFLECTIONS

  This is the grass your feet are planted on.

  You paint it orange or you sing it green,

  But you have never found

  A way to make the grass mean what you mean.