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Collected Poems

Page 18

by Adrienne Rich


  prudently ring out until the morning?

  the threshold of the horizon shifts—

  and think with the thinkers of this earth:

  “Life is thus”—then am I crazed

  because my heart encloses what it held?

  Morning has broken and the sea

  is wide, I go back home to sleep.

  Path, dune, trees and sheep

  are rosy from the east, a rosy gull

  flies up under the rash sky.

  What’s silent speaks aloud buried in sleep.

  POEMS

  (1962–1965)

  TO JUDITH, TAKING LEAVE

  For J.H.

  Dull-headed, with dull fingers

  I patch once more

  the pale brown envelope

  still showing under ink scratches

  the letterhead of Mind.

  A chorus of old postmarks

  echoes across its face.

  It looks so frail

  to send so far

  and I should tear it across

  mindlessly

  and find another.

  But I’m tired, can’t endure

  a single new motion

  or room or object,

  so I cling to this too

  as if your tallness moving

  against the rainlight

  in an Amsterdam flat

  might be held awhile

  by a handwritten label

  or a battered envelope

  from your desk.

  Once somewhere else

  I shan’t talk of you

  as a singular event

  or a beautiful thing I saw

  though both are true.

  I shan’t falsify you

  through praising and describing

  as I shall other

  things I have loved

  almost as much.

  There in Amsterdam

  you’ll be living as I

  have seen you live

  and as I’ve never seen you.

  And I can trust

  no plane to bring you

  my life out there

  in turbid America—

  my own life, lived against

  facts I keep there.

  It wasn’t literacy—

  the right to read Mind—

  or suffrage—to vote

  for the lesser of two

  evils—that were

  the great gains, I see now,

  when I think of all those women

  who suffered ridicule

  for us.

  But this little piece of ground,

  Judith! that two women

  in love to the nerves’ limit

  with two men—

  shared out in pieces

  to men, children, memories

  so different and so draining—

  should think it possible

  now for the first time

  perhaps, to love each other

  neither as fellow-victims

  nor as a temporary

  shadow of something better.

  Still shared-out as we are,

  lovers, poets, warmers

  of men and children

  against our flesh, not knowing

  from day to day

  what we’ll fling out on the water

  or what pick up

  there at the tide’s lip,

  often tired, as I’m tired now

  from sheer distances of soul

  we have in one day to cover—

  still to get here

  to this little spur or headland

  and feel now free enough

  to leave our weapons somewhere

  else—such are the secret

  outcomes of revolution!

  that two women can meet

  no longer as cramped sharers

  of a bitter mutual secret

  but as two eyes in one brow

  receiving at one moment

  the rainbow of the world.

  1962

  ROOTS

  For M.L.

  Evenings seem endless, now

  dark tugs at our sky

  harder and earlier

  and milkweeds swell to bursting …

  now in my transatlantic eye

  you stand on your terrace

  a scarf on your head and in your hands

  dead stalks of golden-glow

  and now it’s for you,

  not myself, I shiver

  hearing glass doors rattle

  at your back, the rustling cough

  of a dry clematis vine

  your love and toil trained up the walls

  of a rented house.

  All those roots, Margo!

  Didn’t you start each slip between your breasts,

  each dry seed, carrying some

  across frontiers, knotted

  into your handkerchief,

  haven’t you seen your tears

  glisten in narrow trenches

  where rooted cuttings grope for life?

  You, frailer than you look,

  long back, long stride, blond hair

  coiled up over straight shoulders—

  I hear in your ear the wind

  lashing in wet from the North Sea

  slamming the dahlias flat.

  All your work violated

  every autumn, every turn of the wrist

  guiding the trowel: mocked.

  Sleet on brown fibers,

  black wilt eating your harvest,

  a clean sweep, and you the loser …

  or is this after all

  the liberation your hands fend off

  and your eyes implore

  when you dream of sudden death

  or of beginning anew,

  a girl of seventeen, the war just over,

  and all the gardens

  to dig again?

  1963

  THE PARTING: II

  White morning flows into the mirror.

  Her eye, still old with sleep,

  meets itself like a sister.

  How they slept last night,

  the dream that caged them back to back,

  was nothing new.

  Last words, tears, most often

  come wrapped as the everyday

  familiar failure.

  Now, pulling the comb slowly

  through her loosened hair

  she tries to find the parting;

  it must come out after all:

  hidden in all that tangle

  there is a way.

  1963

  WINTER

  Dead, dead, dead, dead.

  A beast of the Middle Ages

  stupefied in its den.

  The hairs on its body—a woman’s—

  cold as hairs on a bulb or tuber.

  Nothing so bleakly leaden, you tell me,

  as the hyacinth’s dull cone

  before it bulks into blueness.

  Ah, but I’d chosen to be

  a woman, not a beast or a tuber!

  No one knows where the storks went,

  everyone knows they have disappeared.

  Something—that woman—seems to have

  migrated also; if she lives, she lives

  sea-zones away, and the meaning grows colder.

  1965

  LEAFLETS

  (1969)

  For Rose Marie and Hayden Carruth

  I

  Night Watch

  ORION

  Far back when I went zig-zagging

  through tamarack pastures

  you were my genius, you

  my cast-iron Viking, my helmed

  lion-heart king in prison.

  Years later now you’re young

  my fierce half-brother, staring

  down from that simplified west

  your breast open, your belt dragged down

  by an oldfashioned thing, a sword

  the last bravado you won’t give over


  though it weighs you down as you stride

  and the stars in it are dim

  and maybe have stopped burning.

  But you burn, and I know it;

  as I throw back my head to take you in

  an old transfusion happens again:

  divine astronomy is nothing to it.

  Indoors I bruise and blunder,

  break faith, leave ill enough

  alone, a dead child born in the dark.

  Night cracks up over the chimney,

  pieces of time, frozen geodes

  come showering down in the grate.

  A man reaches behind my eyes

  and finds them empty

  a woman’s head turns away

  from my head in the mirror

  children are dying my death

  and eating crumbs of my life.

  Pity is not your forte.

  Calmly you ache up there

  pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,

  my speechless pirate!

  You take it all for granted

  and when I look you back

  it’s with a starlike eye

  shooting its cold and egotistical spear

  where it can do least damage.

  Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon

  out here in the cold with you

  you with your back to the wall.

  1965

  HOLDING OUT

  The hunters’ shack will do,

  abandoned, untended, unmended

  in its cul-de-sac of alders.

  Inside, who knows what

  hovel-keeping essentials—

  a grey saucepan, a broom, a clock

  stopped at last autumn’s last hour—

  all or any, what matter.

  The point is, it’s a shelter,

  a place more in- than outside.

  From that we could begin.

  And the wind is surely rising,

  snow is in the alders.

  Maybe the stovepipe is sound,

  maybe the smoke will do us in

  at first—no matter.

  Late afternoons the ice

  squeaks underfoot like mica,

  and when the sun drops red and moon-

  faced back of the gun-colored firs,

  the best intentions are none too good.

  Then we have to make a go of it

  in the smoke with the dark outside

  and our love in our boots at first—

  no matter.

  1965

  FLESH AND BLOOD

  For C.

  A cracked walk in the garden,

  white violets choking in the ivy,

  then O then …

  Everyone else I’ve had to tell how it was,

  only not you.

  Nerve-white, the cloud came walking

  over the crests of tallest trees.

  Doors slammed. We

  fell asleep, hot Sundays, in our slips,

  two mad little goldfish

  fluttering in a drying pond.

  Nobody’s seen the trouble I’ve seen

  but you.

  Our jokes are funnier for that

  you’d say

  and, Lord, it’s true.

  1965

  IN THE EVENING

  Three hours chain-smoking words

  and you move on. We stand in the porch,

  two archaic figures: a woman and a man.

  The old masters, the old sources,

  haven’t a clue what we’re about,

  shivering here in the half-dark ’sixties.

  Our minds hover in a famous impasse

  and cling together. Your hand

  grips mine like a railing on an icy night.

  The wall of the house is bleeding. Firethorn!

  The moon, cracked every which-way,

  pushes steadily on.

  1966

  MISSING THE POINT

  There it was, all along,

  twisted up in that green vine-thread,

  in the skeins of marble,

  on the table behind them—those two!

  white-faced and undeterred—

  everything doubled: forks,

  brown glass tumblers, echoing plates,

  two crumbled portions of bread.

  That was the point that was missed

  when they left the room with its wavy light

  and pale curtains blowing

  and guessed the banquet was over, the picnic

  under the leaves was over,

  when haggling faces pushed in for a look

  and the gingerbread village shrieked outside:

  Who’s in the wrong? Who’s in the wrong?

  1966

  CITY

  From the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg.

  Maybe you spoke to someone

  and on that hour your face

  printed itself for good.

  Where is that man? I need

  to find him before he dies

  and see you drift across his retina.

  You have played with children.

  They will run up to me

  whenever you

  come home free in their dreams.

  Houses, realized by you,

  slumber in that web.

  Streets suppose you

  in other streets, and call:

  Evening papers …

  Strawberries …

  The city has changed hands;

  the plan you gave it, fallen through.

  1962

  DWINGELO

  From the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg.

  In the never, still arriving, I find you

  again: blue absence keeps knowledge alive,

  makes of October an adjusted lens.

  The days have almost no clouds left.

  Cassiopeia, the Great Bear

  let their signals burst by night

  to rip into impossibility.

  The Pleiades rage silently about.

  To wait is the password; and to listen.

  In Dwingelo you can hear it whisper,

  the void in the radiotelescope.

  There too the singing of your nerves is gathered,

  becoming graphic on a sheet of paper

  not unlike this one here.

  1962

  THE DEMON LOVER

  Fatigue, regrets. The lights

  go out in the parking lot

  two by two. Snow blindness

  settles over the suburb.

  Desire. Desire. The nebula

  opens in space, unseen,

  your heart utters its great beats

  in solitude. A new

  era is coming in.

  Gauche as we are, it seems

  we have to play our part.

  A plaid dress, silk scarf,

  and eyes that go on stinging.

  Woman, stand off. The air

  glistens like silk.

  She’s gone. In her place stands

  a schoolgirl, morning light,

  the half-grown bones

  of innocence. Is she

  your daughter or your muse,

  this tree of blondness

  grown up in a field of thorns?

  Something piercing and marred.

  Take note. Look back. When quick

  the whole northeast went black

  and prisoners howled and children

  ran through the night with candles,

  who stood off motionless

  side by side while the moon swam up

  over the drowned houses?

  Who neither touched nor spoke?

  whose nape, whose finger-ends

  nervelessly lied the hours away?

  A voice presses at me.

  If I give in it won’t

  be like the girl the bull rode,

  all Rubens flesh and happy moans.

  But to be wrestled like a boy

  with tongue, hips, knees, nerves, brain …

  with language
?

  He doesn’t know. He’s watching

  breasts under a striped blouse,

  his bull’s head down.

  The old wine pours again through my veins.

  Goodnight, then. ’Night. Again

  we turn our backs and weary

  weary we let down.

  Things take us hard, no question.

  How do you make it, all the way

  from here to morning? I touch

  you, made of such nerve

  and flare and pride and swallowed tears.

  Go home. Come to bed. The skies

  look in at us, stern.

  And this is an old story.

  I dreamed about the war.

  We were all sitting at table

  in a kitchen in Chicago.

  The radio had just screamed

  that Illinois was the target.

  No one felt like leaving,

  we sat by the open window

  and talked in the sunset.

  I’ll tell you that joke tomorrow,

  you said with your saddest smile,

  if I can remember.

  The end is just a straw,

  a feather furling slowly down,

  floating to light by chance, a breath

  on the long-loaded scales.

  Posterity trembles like a leaf

  and we go on making heirs and heirlooms.

  The world, we have to make it,

  my coexistent friend said, leaning

  back in his cell.

  Siberia vastly hulks

  behind him, which he did not make.

  Oh futile tenderness

  of touch in a world like this!

  how much longer, dear child,

  do you think sex will matter?

  There might have been a wedding

  that never was:

  two creatures sprung free

  from castiron covenants.

  Instead our hands and minds

  erotically waver …

 

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