Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 16

by Adrienne Rich


  droop at your fear.

  Mother I no more am,

  but woman, and nightmare.

  HER WAKING

  Tonight I jerk astart in a dark

  hourless as Hiroshima,

  almost hearing you breathe

  in a cot three doors away.

  You still breathe, yes—

  and my dream with its gift of knives,

  its murderous hider and seeker,

  ebbs away, recoils

  back into the egg of dreams,

  the vanishing point of mind.

  All gone.

  But you and I—

  swaddled in a dumb dark

  old as sickheartedness,

  modern as pure annihilation—

  we drift in ignorance.

  If I could hear you now

  mutter some gentle animal sound!

  If milk flowed from my breast again….

  1964

  THE STRANGER

  Fond credos, plaster ecstasies!

  We arrange a prison-temple

  for the weak-legged little god

  who might stamp the world to bits

  or pull the sky in like a muslin curtain.

  We hang his shrine with bells,

  aeolian harps, paper windmills,

  line it with biscuits and swansdown.

  His lack of culture we expected,

  scarcely his disdain however—

  that wild hauteur, as if

  it were we who blundered.

  Wildness we fret to avenge!

  Eye that hasn’t yet blinked

  on the unblinking gold archways

  of its trance—that we know

  must be trained away:

  that aloof, selective stare.

  Otherness that affronts us

  as cats and dogs do not—

  once this was original sin

  beaten away with staves of holy writ.

  Old simplemindedness. But the primal fault

  of the little god still baffles.

  All other strangers are forgiven

  Their strangeness, but he—

  how save the eggshell world from his

  reaching hands, how shield

  ourselves from the disintegrating

  blaze of his wide pure eye?

  1964

  AFTER DARK

  I.

  You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you

  old tree of life

  old man whose death I wanted

  I can’t stir you up now.

  Faintly a phonograph needle

  Whirs round in the last groove

  eating my heart to dust.

  That terrible record! how it played

  down years, wherever I was

  in foreign languages even

  over and over, I know you better

  than you know yourselfI know

  you better than you know

  yourselfI know

  youuntil, self-maimed,

  I limped off, torn at the roots,

  stopped singing a whole year,

  got a new body, new breath,

  got children, croaked for words,

  forgot to listen

  or read your mene tekel fading on the wall,

  woke up one morning

  and knew myself your daughter.

  Blood is a sacred poison.

  Now, unasked, you give ground.

  We only want to stifle

  what’s stifling us already.

  Alive now, root to crown, I’d give

  —oh,—something—not to know

  our struggles now are ended.

  I seem to hold you, cupped

  in my hands, and disappearing.

  When your memory fails—

  no more to scourge my inconsistencies—

  the sashcords of the world fly loose.

  A window crashes

  suddenly down. I go to the woodbox

  and take a stick of kindling

  to prop the sash again.

  I grow protective toward the world.

  II.

  Now let’s away from prison—

  Underground seizures!

  I used to huddle in the grave

  I’d dug for you and bite

  my tongue for fear it would babble

  —Darling—

  I thought they’d find me there

  someday, sitting upright, shrunken,

  my hair like roots and in my lap

  a mess of broken pottery—

  wasted libation—

  and you embalmed beside me.

  No, let’s away. Even now

  there’s a walk between doomed elms

  (whose like we shall not see much longer)

  and something—grass and water—

  an old dream-photograph.

  I’ll sit with you there and tease you

  for wisdom, if you like,

  waiting till the blunt barge

  bumps along the shore.

  Poppies burn in the twilight

  like smudge pots.

  I think you hardly see me

  but—this is the dream now—

  your fears blow out,

  off, over the water.

  At the last, your hand feels steady.

  1964

  MOURNING PICTURE

  The picture is by Edwin Romanzo Elmer, 1850–1923.

  They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker

  out under the lilac bush,

  and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.

  Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,

  my doll lies in her wicker pram

  gazing at western Massachusetts.

  This was our world.

  I could remake each shaft of grass

  feeling its rasp on my fingers,

  draw out the map of every lilac leaf

  or the net of veins on my father’s

  grief-tranced hand.

  Out of my head, half-bursting,

  still filling, the dream condenses—

  shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew.

  Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light

  carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,

  under high early-summer clouds,

  I am Effie, visible and invisible,

  remembering and remembered.

  They will move from the house,

  give the toys and the pets away.

  Mute and rigid with loss my mother

  will ride the train to Baptist Corner,

  the silk-spool will run bare.

  I tell you, the thread that bound us lies

  faint as a web in the dew.

  Should I make you, world, again,

  could I give back the leaf its skeleton, the air

  its early-summer cloud, the house

  its noonday presence, shadowless,

  and leave this out? I am Effie, you were my dream.

  1965

  “I AM IN DANGER—SIR—”

  “Half-cracked” to Higginson, living,

  afterward famous in garbled versions,

  your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield,

  now your old snood

  mothballed at Harvard

  and you in your variorum monument

  equivocal to the end—

  who are you?

  Gardening the day-lily,

  wiping the wine-glass stems,

  your thought pulsed on behind

  a forehead battered paper-thin,

  you, woman, masculine

  in single-mindedness,

  for whom the word was more

  than a symptom—

  a condition of being.

  Till the air buzzing with spoiled language

  sang in your ears

  of Perjury

  and in your half-cracked way you chose

  silence for entertainment,

  cho
se to have it out at last

  on your own premises.

  1964

  HALFWAY

  In Memory: M.G.J.

  In the field the air writhes, a heat-pocket.

  Masses of birds revolve, blades

  of a harvester.

  The sky is getting milkily white,

  a sac of light is ready to burst open.

  Time of hailstones and rainbow.

  My life flows North. At last I understand.

  A young girl, thought sleeping, is certified dead.

  A tray of expensive waxen fruit,

  she lies arranged on the spare-room coverlid.

  To sit by the fire is to become another woman,

  red hair charring to grey,

  green eyes grappling with the printed page,

  voice flailing, flailing, the uncomprehending.

  My days lie open, listening, grandmother.

  1965

  AUTUMN SEQUENCE

  1.

  An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,

  and dreams of the subtly tyrannical.

  Thirst in the morning; waking into the blue

  drought of another October

  to read the familiar message nailed

  to some burning bush or maple.

  Breakfast under the pines, late yellow-

  jackets fumbling for manna on the rim

  of the stone crock of marmalade,

  and shed pine-needles drifting

  in the half-empty cup.

  Generosity is drying out,

  it’s an act of will to remember

  May’s sticky-mouthed buds

  on the provoked magnolias.

  2.

  Still, a sweetness hardly earned

  by virtue or craft, belonging

  by no desperate right to me

  (as the marmalade to the wasp

  who risked all in a last euphoria

  of hunger)

  washes the horizon. A quiet

  after weeping, salt still on the tongue

  is like this, when the autumn planet

  looks me straight in the eye

  and straight into the mind

  plunges its impersonal spear:

  Fill and flow over, think

  till you weep, then sleep

  to drink again.

  3.

  Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb

  flayed stiff in the wind,

  half-mast on the day of victory,

  anarchist prince of evening marshes!

  Your eye blurs in a wet smoke,

  the stubble freezes under your heel,

  the cornsilk Mädchen all hags now,

  their gold teeth drawn,

  the milkweeds gutted and rifled,

  but not by you, foundering hero!

  The future reconnoiters in dirty boots

  along the cranberry-dark horizon.

  Stars swim like grease-flecks

  in that sky, night pulls a long knife.

  Your empire drops to its knees in the dark.

  4.

  Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

  Charcoal slabs pitted with gold.

  The reason for cities comes clear.

  There must be a place, there has come a time—

  where so many nerves are fusing—

  for a purely moral loneliness.

  Behind bloodsoaked lights of the avenues,

  in the crystal grit of flying snow,

  in this water-drop bulging at the taphead,

  forced by dynamos three hundred miles

  from the wild duck’s landing and the otter’s dive,

  for three seconds of quivering identity.

  There must be a place. But the eyeball stiffens

  as night tightens and my hero passes out

  with a film of stale gossip coating his tongue.

  1964

  NOON

  Light pulses through underground chambers.

  I have to tell myself: my eyes are not blue.

  Two dark holes

  Feed at the sky.

  It swirls through them, raging

  in azure spirals.

  Nothing changes them:

  two black tubes, draining off

  a lake of iris.

  Cleave open my skull:

  The gouts of blue

  Leap from the black grotto.

  1965

  NOT LIKE THAT

  It’s so pure in the cemetery.

  The children love to play up here.

  It’s a little town, a game of blocks,

  a village packed in a box,

  a pre-war German toy.

  The turf is a bedroom carpet:

  heal-all, strawberry flower

  and hillocks of moss.

  To come and sit here forever,

  a cup of tea on one’s lap

  and one’s eyes closed lightly, lightly,

  perfectly still

  in a nineteenth-century sleep!

  it seems so normal to die.

  Nobody sleeps here, children.

  The little beds of white wrought iron

  and the tall, kind, faceless nurse

  are somewhere else, in a hospital

  or the dreams of prisoners of war.

  The drawers of this trunk are empty,

  not even a snapshot

  curls in a corner.

  In Pullmans of childhood we lay

  enthralled behind dark-green curtains,

  and a little lamp burned blue

  all night, for us. The day

  was a dream too, even the oatmeal

  under its silver lid, dream-cereal

  spooned out in forests of spruce

  skirting the green-black gorges,

  thick woods of sleep, half prickle,

  half lakes of fern.

  To stay here forever

  is not like that, nor even

  simply to lie quite still,

  the warm trickle of dream

  staining the thick quiet.

  The drawers of this trunk are empty.

  They are all out of sleep up here.

  1965

  THE KNOT

  In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood.

  For years I never saw it,

  years of metallic vision,

  spears glancing off a bright eyeball,

  suns off a Swiss lake.

  A foaming meadow; the Milky Way;

  and there, all along, the tiny dark-red spider

  sitting in the whiteness of the bridal web,

  waiting to plunge his crimson knifepoint

  into the white apparencies.

  Little wonder the eye, healing, sees

  for a long time through a mist of blood.

  1965

  ANY HUSBAND TO ANY WIFE

  “Might I die last and show thee!”

  I know: you are glycerine,

  old quills, rose velvet,

  tearstains in Middlemarch,

  a style of getting into cabs, of eating fruit,

  a drawer of stones, chains, seeds, shells, little mirrors:

  Darling, you will outlive yourself, and me.

  Sometimes the sea backs up against a lashed pier,

  grinding and twisting,

  a turmoil of wrecked stuff

  alive and dead. And the pier stands groaning

  as if the land depended on it.

  We say it is the moon that draws these tides,

  then glazes in aftercalm

  the black, blurred face to something we can love.

  1965

  SIDE BY SIDE

  Ho! in the dawn

  how light we lie

  stirring faintly as laundry

  left all night on the lines.

  You, a lemon-gold pyjama,

  I, a trousseau-sheet, fine

  linen worn paper-thin in places,

  worked with the maiden monogram.

  Lassitude drapes our folds.r />
  We’re slowly bleaching

  with the days, the hours, and the years.

  We are getting finer than ever,

  time is wearing us to silk,

  to sheer spiderweb.

  The eye of the sun, rising, looks in

  to ascertain how we are coming on.

  1965

  SPRING THUNDER

  1.

  Thunder is all it is, and yet

  my street becomes a crack in the western hemisphere,

  my house a fragile nest of grasses.

  The radiotelescope flings its nets

  at random; a child is crying,

  not from hunger, not from pain,

  more likely impotence. The generals are sweltering

  in the room with a thousand eyes.

  Red-hot lights flash off and on

  inside air-conditioned skulls.

  Underfoot, a land-mass

  puffed-up with bad faith and fatigue

  goes lumbering onward,

  old raft in the swollen waters,

  unreformed Huck and Jim

  watching the tangled yellow shores

  rush by.

  2.

  Whatever you are that weeps

  over the blistered riverbeds

 

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