Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  A cloud can be whatever you intend:

  Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye.

  But you have never found

  A cloud sufficient to express the sky.

  Get out there with your splendid expertise;

  Raymond who cuts the meadow does no less.

  Inhuman nature says:

  Inhuman patience is the true success.

  Human impatience trips you as you run;

  Stand still and you must lie.

  It is the grass that cuts the mower down;

  It is the cloud that swallows up the sky.

  1956

  THE KNIGHT

  A knight rides into the noon,

  and his helmet points to the sun,

  and a thousand splintered suns

  are the gaiety of his mail.

  The soles of his feet glitter

  and his palms flash in reply,

  and under his crackling banner

  he rides like a ship in sail.

  A knight rides into the noon,

  and only his eye is living,

  a lump of bitter jelly

  set in a metal mask,

  betraying rags and tatters

  that cling to the flesh beneath

  and wear his nerves to ribbons

  under the radiant casque.

  Who will unhorse this rider

  and free him from between

  the walls of iron, the emblems

  crushing his chest with their weight?

  Will they defeat him gently,

  or leave him hurled on the green,

  his rags and wounds still hidden

  under the great breastplate?

  1957

  THE LOSER

  A man thinks of the woman he once loved:

  first, after her wedding, and then nearly a decade later.

  I.

  I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

  home from that bourgeois sacrament,

  your cheek still tasting cold upon

  my lips that gave you benison

  with all the swagger that they knew—

  as losers somehow learn to do.

  Your wedding made my eyes ache; soon

  the world would be worse off for one

  more golden apple dropped to ground

  without the least protesting sound,

  and you would windfall lie, and we

  forget your shimmer on the tree.

  Beauty is always wasted: if

  not Mignon’s song sung to the deaf,

  at all events to the unmoved.

  A face like yours cannot be loved

  long or seriously enough.

  Almost, we seem to hold it off.

  II.

  Well, you are tougher than I thought.

  Now when the wash with ice hangs taut

  this morning of St. Valentine,

  I see you strip the squeaking line,

  your body weighed against the load,

  and all my groans can do no good.

  Because you still are beautiful,

  though squared and stiffened by the pull

  of what nine windy years have done.

  You have three daughters, lost a son.

  I see all your intelligence

  flung into that unwearied stance.

  My envy is of no avail.

  I turn my head and wish him well

  who chafed your beauty into use

  and lives forever in a house

  lit by the friction of your mind.

  You stagger in against the wind.

  1958

  THE ABSENT-MINDED

  ARE ALWAYS TO BLAME

  What do you look for down there

  in the cracks of the pavement? Or up there

  between the pineapple and the acanthus leaf

  in that uninspired ornament? Odysseus

  wading half-naked out of the shrubbery

  like a god, dead serious among those at play,

  could hardly be more out of it. In school

  we striped your back with chalk, you all oblivious,

  your eyes harnessed by a transparent strand

  reaching the other side of things, or down

  like a wellchain to the center of earth.

  Now with those same eyes you pull the

  pavements up like old linoleum,

  arches of triumph start to liquefy

  minutes after you slowly turn away.

  1958

  EURYCLEA’S TALE

  I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting

  for a father dawdling among the isles,

  and the seascape hollowed out by that boy’s edged gaze

  to receive one speck, one only, for years and years withheld.

  And that speck, that curious man, has kept from home

  till home would seem the forbidden place, till blood

  and the tears of an old woman must run down

  to satisfy the genius of place. Even then, what

  can they do together, father and son?

  the driftwood stranger and the rooted boy

  whose eyes will have nothing then to ask the sea.

  But all the time and everywhere

  lies in ambush for the distracted eyeball

  light: light on the ship racked up in port,

  the chimney-stones, the scar whiter than smoke,

  than her flanks, her hair, that true but aging bride.

  1958

  SEPTEMBER 21

  Wear the weight of equinoctial evening,

  light like melons bruised on all the porches.

  Feel the houses tenderly appraise you,

  hold you in the watchfulness of mothers.

  Once the nighttime was a milky river

  washing past the swimmers in the sunset,

  rinsing over sleepers of the morning.

  Soon the night will be an eyeless quarry

  where the shrunken daylight and its rebels,

  loosened,dive like stones in perfect silence,

  names and voices drown without reflection.

  Then the houses draw you. Then they have you.

  1958

  AFTER A SENTENCE

  IN “MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE”

  The month’s eye blurs.

  The winter’s lungs are cracked.

  Along bloated gutters race,

  shredded, your injured legions,

  the waste of our remorseless search.

  Your old, unuttered names are holes

  worn in our skins

  through which we feel from time to time

  abrasive wind.

  Those who are loved live poorly and in danger.

  We who were loved will never

  unlive that crippling fever.

  A day returns, a certain weather

  splatters the panes, and we

  once more stare in the eye of our first failure.

  1958

  SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

  1.

  You, once a belle in Shreveport,

  with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,

  still have your dresses copied from that time,

  and play a Chopin prelude

  called by Cortot: “Delicious recollections

  float like perfume through the memory.”

  Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,

  heavy with useless experience, rich

  with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,

  crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge

  of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

  Nervy, glowering, your daughter

  wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

  2.

  Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

  she hears the angels chiding, and looks out

  past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.

  Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

  The next time it was: Be insatiable.

  Then:
Save yourself; others you cannot save.

  Sometimes she’s let the tapstream scald her arm,

  a match burn to her thumbnail,

  or held her hand above the kettle’s snout

  right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,

  since nothing hurts her any more, except

  each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes.

  3.

  A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

  The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,

  that sprung-lidded, still commodious

  steamer-trunk of tempora and mores

  gets stuffed with it all:the mildewed orange-flowers,

  the female pills, the terrible breasts

  of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.

  Two handsome women, gripped in argument,

  each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream

  across the cut glass and majolica

  like Furies cornered from their prey:

  The argument ad feminam, all the old knives

  that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,

  ma semblable, ma soeur!

  4.

  Knowing themselves too well in one another:

  their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,

  the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn …

  Reading while waiting

  for the iron to heat,

  writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—

  in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,

  or, more often,

  iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,

  dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

  5.

  Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

  she shaves her legs until they gleam

  like petrified mammoth-tusk.

  6.

  When to her lute Corinna sings

  neither words nor music are her own;

  only the long hair dipping

  over her cheek, only the song

  of silk against her knees

  and these

  adjusted in reflections of an eye.

  Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before

  an unlocked door, that cage of cages,

  tell us, you bird, you tragical machine—

  is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned down

  by love, for you the only natural action,

  are you edged more keen

  to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown

  her household books to you, daughter-in-law,

  that her sons never saw?

  7.

  “To have in this uncertain world some stay

  which cannot be undermined, is

  of the utmost consequence.”

  Thus wrote

  a woman, partly brave and partly good,

  who fought with what she partly understood.

  Few men about her would or could do more,

  hence she was labelled harpy, shrew and whore.

  8.

  “You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

  and turn part legend, part convention.

  Still, eyes inaccurately dream

  behind closed windows blankening with steam.

  Deliciously, all that we might have been,

  all that we were—fire, tears,

  wit, taste, martyred ambition—

  stirs like the memory of refused adultery

  the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

  9.

  Not that it is done well, but

  that it is done at all? Yes, think

  of the odds! or shrug them off forever.

  This luxury of the precocious child,

  Time’s precious chronic invalid,—

  would we, darlings, resign it if we could?

  Our blight has been our sinecure:

  mere talent was enough for us—

  glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

  Sigh no more, ladies.

  Time is male

  and in his cups drinks to the fair.

  Bemused by gallantry, we hear

  our mediocrities over-praised,

  indolence read as abnegation,

  slattern thought styled intuition,

  every lapse forgiven, our crime

  only to cast too bold a shadow

  or smash the mould straight off.

  For that, solitary confinement,

  tear gas, attrition shelling.

  Few applicants for that honor.

  10.

  Well,

  she’s long about her coming, who must be

  more merciless to herself than history.

  Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge

  breasted and glancing through the currents,

  taking the light upon her

  at least as beautiful as any boy

  or helicopter,

  poised, still coming,

  her fine blades making the air wince

  but her cargo

  no promise then:

  delivered

  palpable

  ours.

  1958–1960

  PASSING ON

  The landlord’s hammer in the yard

  patches a porch where your shirts swing

  brashly against May’s creamy blue.

  This year the forsythia ran wild,

  chrome splashed on the spring evenings,

  every bush a pile of sulphur.

  Now, ragged, they bend

  under the late wind’s onslaught, tousled

  as my head beneath the clotheslines.

  Soon we’ll be off. I’ll pack us into parcels,

  stuff us in barrels, shroud us in newspapers,

  pausing to marvel at old bargain sales:

  Oh, all the chances we never seized!

  Emptiness round the stoop of the house

  minces, catwise, waiting for an in.

  1959

  THE RAVEN

  If, antique hateful bird,

  flapping through dawngagged streets

  of metal shopfronts grated down

  on pedestrian nerve-ends,

  if, as on old film,

  my features blurred and grained like cereal,

  you find me walking up and down

  waiting for my first dream,

  don’t try to sully my head

  with vengeful squirtings. Fly on,

  ratfooted cautionary of my dark,

  till we meet further along.

  You are no dream, old genius.

  I smell you, get my teeth on edge,

  stand in my sweat—in mercury—

  even as you prime your feathers and set sail.

  1959

  MERELY TO KNOW

  I.

  Wedged in by earthworks

  thrown up by snouters before me,

  I kick and snuffle, breathing in

  cobwebs of beetle-cuirass:

  vainglory of polished green,

  infallible pincer, resonant nerve,

  a thickening on the air now,

  confusion to my lungs, no more.

  My predecessors blind me—

  their zeal exhausted among roots and tunnels,

  they gasped and looked up once or twice

  into the beechtree’s nightblack glitter.

  II.

  Let me take you by the hair

  and drag you backward to the light,

  there spongelike press my gaze

  patiently upon your eyes,

  hold like a photographic plate

  against you my enormous question.

  What if you cringe, what if you weep?

  Suffer this and you need suffer

  nothing more. I’ll give you back

  yourself at last to the last part.

  I take nothing, only look.

  Change nothing. Have no need to change.

  Merely to know and let you go.

  1959
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br />   III.

  Spirit like water

  molded by unseen stone

  and sandbar, pleats and funnels

  according to its own

  submerged necessity—

  to the indolent eye

  pure willfulness, to the stray

  pine-needle boiling

  in that cascade-bent pool

  a random fury: Law,

  if that’s what’s wanted, lies

  asking to be read

  in the dried brook-bed.

  1961

  ANTINOÜS: THE DIARIES

  Autumn torture. The old signs

  smeared on the pavement, sopping leaves

  rubbed into the landscape as unguent on a bruise,

  brought indoors, even, as they bring flowers, enormous,

  with the colors of the body’s secret parts.

  All this. And then, evenings, needing to be out,

  walking fast, fighting the fire

  that must die, light that sets my teeth on edge with joy,

  till on the black embankment

  I’m a cart stopped in the ruts of time.

  Then at some house the rumor of truth and beauty

  saturates a room like lilac-water

  in the stream of a bath, fires snap, heads are high,

  gold hair at napes of necks, gold in glasses,

  gold in the throat, poetry of furs and manners.

  Why do I shiver then? Haven’t I seen,

  over and over, before the end of an evening,

  the three opened coffins carried in and left in a corner?

  Haven’t I watched as somebody cracked his shin

  on one of them, winced and hopped and limped

  laughing to lay his hand on a beautiful arm