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Collected Poems

Page 22

by Adrienne Rich


  back from false pride, false indifference, false

  courage

  beginning to weep as you weep peeling onions, but

  endlessly, for the rest of time, tears of chemistry,

  tears of catalyst, tears of rage, tears for yourself,

  tears for the tortured men in the stockade and for

  their torturers

  tears of fear, of the child stepping into the adult

  field of force, the woman stepping into the male field

  of violence, tears of relief, that your body was here,

  you had done it, every last refusal was over)

  Here in this house my tears are running wild

  in this Vermont of India-madras-colored leaves, of cesspool-

  stricken brooks, of violence licking at old people and

  children

  and I am afraid

  of the language in my head

  I am alone, alone with language

  and without meaning

  coming back to something written years ago:

  our words misunderstand us

  wanting a word that will shed itself like a tear

  onto the page

  leaving its stain

  Trying every key in the bunch to get the door even ajar

  not knowing whether it’s locked or simply jammed from long disuse

  trying the keys over and over then throwing the bunch away

  staring around for an axe

  wondering if the world can be changed like this

  if a life can be changed like this

  It wasn’t completeness I wanted

  (the old ideas of a revolution that could be foretold, and once

  arrived at would give us ourselves and each other)

  I stopped listening long ago to their descriptions

  of the good society

  The will to change begins in the body not in the mind

  My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every

  act of resistance and each of my failures

  Locked in the closet at 4 years old I beat the wall with my body

  that act is in me still

  No, not completeness:

  but I needed a way of saying

  (this is what they are afraid of)

  that could deal with these fragments

  I needed to touch you

  with a hand, a body

  but also with words

  I need a language to hear myself with

  to see myself in

  a language like pigment released on the board

  blood-black, sexual green, reds

  veined with contradictions

  bursting under pressure from the tube

  staining the old grain of the wood

  like sperm or tears

  but this is not what I mean

  these images are not what I mean

  (I am afraid.)

  I mean that I want you to answer me

  when I speak badly

  that I love you, that we are in danger

  that she wants to have your child, that I want us to have mercy

  on each other

  that I want to take her hand

  that I see you changing

  that it was change I loved in you

  when I thought I loved completeness

  that things I have said which in a few years will be forgotten

  matter more to me than this or any poem

  and I want you to listen

  when I speak badly

  not in poems but in tears

  not my best but my worst

  that these repetitions are beating their way

  toward a place where we can no longer be together

  where my body no longer will demonstrate outside your stockade

  and wheeling through its blind tears will make for the open air

  of another kind of action

  (I am afraid.)

  It’s not the worst way to live.

  1969

  The Will

  To Change

  (1971)

  For David, Pablo and Jacob

  What does not change / is the will to change

  —Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers”

  NOVEMBER 1968

  Stripped

  you’re beginning to float free

  up through the smoke of brushfires

  and incinerators

  the unleafed branches won’t hold you

  nor the radar aerials

  You’re what the autumn knew would happen

  after the last collapse

  of primary color

  once the last absolutes were torn to pieces

  you could begin

  How you broke open, what sheathed you

  until this moment

  I know nothing about it

  my ignorance of you amazes me

  now that I watch you

  starting to give yourself away

  to the wind

  1968

  STUDY OF HISTORY

  Out there.The mind of the river

  as it might be you.

  Lightsblotted by unseen hulls

  repetitive shapes passing

  dull foam crusting the margin

  barges sunk below the water-line with silence.

  The scow, drudging on.

  Lying in the dark, to think of you

  and your harsh traffic

  gulls pecking your rubbishnatural historians

  mourning your lost purity

  pleasure cruisers

  witlessly careening you

  but this

  after all

  is the narrows and after

  all we have never entirely

  known what was done to you upstream

  what powers trepanned

  which of your channels diverted

  what rockface leaned to stare

  in your upturned

  defenseless

  face.

  1968

  PLANETARIUM

  Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750–1848, astronomer,

  sister of William; and others.

  A woman in the shape of a monster

  a monster in the shape of a woman

  the skies are full of them

  a woman‘in the snow

  among the Clocks and instruments

  or measuring the ground with poles’

  in her 98 years to discover

  8 comets

  she whom the moon ruled

  like us

  levitating into the night sky

  riding the polished lenses

  Galaxies of women, there

  doing penance for impetuousness

  ribs chilled

  in those spacesof the mind

  An eye,

  ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’

  from the mad webs of Uranusborg

  encountering the NOVA

  every impulse of light exploding

  from the core

  as life flies out of us

  Tycho whispering at last

  ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

  What we see, we see

  and seeing is changing

  the light that shrivels a mountain

  and leaves a man alive

  Heartbeat of the pulsar

  heart sweating through my body

  The radio impulse

  pouring in from Taurus

  I am bombarded yetI stand

  I have been standing all my life in the

  direct path of a battery of signals

  the most accurately transmitted most

  untranslateable language in the universe

  I am a galactic cloud so deepso invo-

  luted that a light wave could take 15

  years to travel through meAnd has

  takenI am an instrument in the shape

  of a woman trying to translate pulsations

  into imagesfor the relief
of the body

  and the reconstruction of the mind.

  1968

  THE BURNING OF PAPER INSTEAD OF CHILDREN

  I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.

  —Fr. Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore

  1.

  My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state

  of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven

  and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics

  text-book in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his

  house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house

  during that time. “The burning of a book,” he says, “arouses terrible

  sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset

  me so much as the idea of burning a book.”

  Back there: the library, walled

  with green Britannicas

  Looking again

  in Dürer’s Complete Works

  for MELENCOLIA, the baffled woman

  the crocodiles in Herodotus

  the Book of the Dead

  the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue

  I think, It is her color

  and they take the book away

  because I dream of her too often

  love and fear in a house

  knowledge of the oppressor

  I know it hurts to burn

  2.

  To imagine a time of silence

  or few words

  a time of chemistry and music

  the hollows above your buttocks

  traced by my hand

  or, hair is like flesh, you said

  an age of long silence

  relief

  from this tonguethe slab of limestone

  or reinforced concrete

  fanatics and traders

  dumped on this coastwildgreenclayred

  that breathed once

  in signals of smoke

  sweep of the wind

  knowledge of the oppressor

  this is the oppressor’s language

  yet I need it to talk to you

  3.

  “People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence

  to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not

  had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money

  to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food

  for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears

  in your eyes.”

  (the fracture of order

  the repair of speech

  to overcome this suffering)

  4.

  We lie under the sheet

  after making love, speaking

  of loneliness

  relieved in a book

  relived in a book

  so on that page

  the clot and fissure

  of it appears

  words of a man

  in pain

  a naked word

  entering the clot

  a hand grasping

  through bars:

  deliverance

  What happens between us

  has happened for centuries

  we know it from literature

  still it happens

  sexual jealousy

  outflung hand

  beating bed

  dryness of mouth

  after panting

  there are books that describe all this

  and they are useless

  You walk into the woods behind a house

  there in that country

  you find a temple

  built eighteen hundred years ago

  you enter without knowing

  what it is you enter

  so it is with us

  no one knows what may happen

  though the books tell everything

  burn the textssaid Artaud

  5.

  I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.

  1968

  I DREAM I’M THE

  DEATH OF ORPHEUS

  I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade.

  I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers

  and those powers severely limited

  by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

  I am a woman in the prime of life

  driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce

  through a landscape of twilight and thorns.

  A woman with a certain mission

  which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.

  A woman with the nerves of a panther

  a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels

  a woman feeling the fullness of her powers

  at the precise moment when she must not use them

  a woman sworn to lucidity

  who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires

  of these underground streets

  her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind

  on the wrong side of the mirror

  1968

  THE BLUE GHAZALS

  9/21/68

  Violently asleep in the old house.

  A clock stays awake all night ticking.

  Turning, turning their bruised leaves

  the trees stay awake all night in the wood.

  Talk to me with your body through my dreams.

  Tell me what we are going through.

  The walls of the room are muttering,

  old trees, old utopians, arguing with the wind.

  To float like a dead man in a sea of dreams

  and half those dreams being dreamed by someone else.

  Fifteen years of sleepwalking with you,

  wading against the tide, and with the tide.

  9/23/68

  One day of equinoctial light after another,

  moving ourselves through gauzes and fissures of that light.

  Early and late I come and set myself against you,

  your phallic fist knocking blindly at my door.

  The dew is beaded like mercury on the coarsened grass,

  the web of the spider is heavy as if with sweat.

  Everything is yielding toward a foregone conclusion,

  only we are rash enough to go on changing our lives.

  An Ashanti woman tilts the flattened basin on her head

  to let the water slide downward:I am that woman and that water.

  9/26/68: I

  A man, a woman, a city.

  The city as object of love.

  Anger and filth in the basement.

  The furnace stoked and blazing.

  A sexual heat on the pavements.

  Trees erected like statues.

  Eyes at the ends of avenues.

  Yellow for hesitation.

  I’m tired of walking your streets

  he says, unable to leave her.

  Air of dust and rising sparks,

  the city burning her letters.

  9/28/68: II

  For Wallace Stevens

  Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys,

  you were our poet of revolution all along.

  A man isn’t what he seems but what he desires:


  gaieties of anarchy drumming at the base of the skull.

  Would this have left you cold, our scene, its wild parades,

  the costumes, banners, incense, flowers, the immense marches?

  Disorder is natural, these leaves absently blowing

  in the drinking-fountain, filling the statue’s crevice.

  The use of force in public architecture:

  nothing, not even the honeycomb, manifests such control.

  9/29/68

  For Leroi Jones

  Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

  half-sleepy, half-alert in that thicket of bitter roots.

  Who doesn’t speak to me, who speaks to me more and more,

  but from a face turned off, turned away, a light shut out.

  Most of the old lecturers are inaudible or dead.

  Prince of the night there are explosions in the hall.

  The blackboard scribbled over with dead languages

  is falling and killing our children.

  Terribly far away I saw your mouth in the wild light:

  it seemed to me you were shouting instructions to us all.

  12/13/68

  They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,

  the edge of dark from the edge of dawn, your love is a lie.

 

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