Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 25

by Adrienne Rich


  Thinking of that place as an existence.

  A woman reaching for the glass of water left all night on the bureau, the half-done poem, the immediate relief.

  Entering the poem as a method of leaving the room.

  Entering the paper airplane of the poem, which somewhere before its destination starts curling into ash and comes apart.

  The woman is too heavy for the poem, she is a swollenness, a foot, an arm, gone asleep, grown absurd and out of bounds.

  Rooted to memory like a wedge in a block of wood; she takes the pressure of her thought but cannot resist it.

  You call this a poetry of false problems, the shotgun wedding of the mind, the subversion of choice by language.

  Instead of the alternative: to pull the sooty strings to set the window bare to purge the room with light to feel the sun breaking in on the courtyard and the steamheat smothering in the shut-off pipes.

  To feel existence as this time, this place, the pathos and force of the lumps of snow gritted and melting in the unloved corners of the courtyard.

  9. (Newsreel)

  This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is heavier, there were no hills of that size there.

  But I find it impossible not to look for actual persons known to me and not seen since; impossible not to look for myself.

  The scenery angers me, I know there is something wrong, the sun is too high, the grass too trampled, the peasants’ faces too broad, and the main square of the capital had no arcades like those.

  Yet the dead look right, and the roofs of the huts, and the crashed fuselage burning among the ferns.

  But this is not the war I came to see, buying my ticket, stumbling through the darkness, finding my place among the sleepers and masturbators in the dark.

  I thought of seeing the General who cursed us, whose name they gave to an expressway; I wanted to see the faces of the dead when they were living.

  Once I know they filmed us, back at the camp behind the lines, taking showers under the trees and showing pictures of our girls.

  Somewhere there is a film of the war we fought in, and it must contain the flares, the souvenirs, the shadows of the netted brush, the standing in line of the innocent, the hills that were not of this size.

  Somewhere my body goes taut under the deluge, somewhere I am naked behind the lines, washing my body in the water of that war.

  Someone has that war stored up in metal canisters, a memory he cannot use, somewhere my innocence is proven with my guilt, but this would not be the war I fought in.

  10.

  For Valerie Glauber

  They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

  They come and drop their mementoes at the foot of your bed; their feathers, ferns, fans, grasses from the western mountains.

  They wait for you to unfold for them like a paper flower, a secret springing open in a glass of water.

  They believe your future has a history and that it is themselves.

  They have family trees to plant for you, photographs of dead children, old bracelets and rings they want to fasten onto you.

  And, in spite of this, you live alone.

  Your secret hangs in the open like Poe’s purloined letter; their longing and their methods will never let them find it.

  Your secret cries out in the dark and hushes; when they start out of sleep they think you are innocent.

  You hang among them like the icon in a Russian play; living your own intenser life behind the lamp they light in front of you.

  You are spilt here like mercury on a marble counter, liquefying into many globes, each silvered like a planet caught in a lens.

  You are a mirror lost in a brook, an eye reflecting a torrent of reflections.

  You are a letter written, folded, burnt to ash, and mailed in an envelope to another continent.

  11.

  The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.

  When you pull the embedded bones up from the soil, the flies collect again.

  The pelvis, the open archway, staring at me like an eye.

  In the desert these bones would be burnt white; a green bloom grows on them in the woods.

  Did she break her leg or die of poison?

  What was it like when the scavengers came?

  So many questions unanswered, yet the statement is here and clear.

  With what joy you handled the skull, set back the teeth spilt in the grass, hinged back the jaw on the jaw.

  With what joy we left the woods, swinging our sticks, miming the speech of noble savages, of the fathers of our country, bursting into the full sun of the uncut field.

  12.

  I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.

  We walked in the wholesale district: closed warehouses, windows, steeped in sun.

  I said: those cloths are very old. You said: they have lain in that window a long time.

  When the skeletons of the projects shut off the sunset, when the sense of the Hudson leaves us, when only by loss of light in the east do I know that I am living in the west.

  When I give up being paraphrased, when I let go, when the beautiful solutions in their crystal flasks have dried up in the sun, when the lightbulb bursts on lighting, when the dead bulb rattles like a seed-pod.

  Those cloths are very old, they are mummies’ cloths, they have lain in graves, they were not intended to be sold, the tragedy of this mistake will soon be clear.

  Vacillant needles of Manhattan, describing hour & weather; buying these descriptions at the cost of missing every other point.

  13.

  We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to me to put out in a boat, not on a night like this.

  Still, it was an instrument, and I had pledged myself to try any instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction of incompetence.

  A long time I was simply learning to handle the skiff; I had no special training and my own training was against me.

  I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.

  In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.

  I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old days.

  14.

  Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats; ashes spilled on white formica.

  The death-col viewed through power-glasses; the cube of ice melting on stainless steel.

  Whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.

  Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the web of cracks filtering across the plaster.

  To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.

  To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.

  To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is.

  To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages.

  To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in your old neighborhood.

  DIVING INTO THE

  WRECK

  (1971–1972)

  I

  Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

  —André Breton, Nadja

  There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.

  —George Eliot

  TRYING TO TALK WITH A MAN

  Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

  that’s why we came here.

  Sometimes I feel an underground riv
er

  forcing its way between deformed cliffs

  an acute angle of understanding

  moving itself like a locus of the sun

  into this condemned scenery.

  What we’ve had to give up to get here—

  whole LP collections, films we starred in

  playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows

  full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,

  the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,

  afternoons on the riverbank

  pretending to be children

  Coming out to this desert

  we meant to change the face of

  driving among dull green succulents

  walking at noon in the ghost town

  surrounded by a silence

  that sounds like the silence of the place

  except that it came with us

  and is familiar

  and everything we were saying until now

  was an effort to blot it out—

  Coming out here we are up against it

  Out here I feel more helpless

  with you than without you

  You mention the danger

  and list the equipment

  we talk of people caring for each other

  in emergencies—laceration, thirst—

  but you look at me like an emergency

  Your dry heat feels like power

  your eyes are stars of a different magnitude

  they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT

  when you get up and pace the floor

  talking of the danger

  as if it were not ourselves

  as if we were testing anything else.

  1971

  WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN

  For E.Y.

  1.Trying to tell you how

  the anatomy of the park

  through stained panes, the way

  guerrillas are advancing

  through minefields, the trash

  burning endlessly in the dump

  to return to heaven like a stain—

  everything outside our skins is an image

  of this affliction:

  stones on my table, carried by hand

  from scenes I trusted

  souvenirs of what I once described

  as happiness

  everything outside my skin

  speaks of the fault that sends me limping

  even the scars of my decisions

  even the sunblaze in the mica-vein

  even you, fellow-creature, sister,

  sitting across from me, dark with love,

  working like me to pick apart

  working with me to remake

  this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness,

  this woman’s garment, trying to save the skein.

  2.The fact of being separate

  enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture

  —a chest of seventeenth-century wood

  from somewhere in the North.

  It has a huge lock shaped like a woman’s head

  but the key has not been found.

  In the compartments are other keys

  to lost doors, an eye of glass.

  Slowly you begin to add

  things of your own.

  You come and go reflected in its panels.

  You give up keeping track of anniversaries,

  you begin to write in your diaries

  more honestly than ever.

  3.The lovely landscape of southern Ohio

  betrayed by strip mining, the

  thick gold band on the adulterer’s finger

  the blurred programs of the offshore pirate station

  are causes for hesitation.

  Here in the matrix of need and anger, the

  disproof of what we thought possible

  failures of medication

  doubts of another’s existence

  —tell it over and over, the words

  get thick with unmeaning—

  yet never have we been closer to the truth

  of the lies we were living, listen to me:

  the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed

  flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing

  the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.

  1971

  WAKING IN THE DARK

  1.

  The thing that arrests me is

  how we are composed of molecules

  (he showed me the figure in the paving stones)

  arranged without our knowledge and consent

  like the wirephoto composed

  of millions of dots

  in which the man from Bangladesh

  walks starving

  on the front page

  knowing nothing about it

  which is his presence for the world

  2.

  We were standing in line outside of something

  two by two, or alone in pairs, or simply alone,

  looking into windows full of scissors,

  windows full of shoes. The street was closing,

  the city was closing, would we be the lucky ones

  to make it? They were showing

  in a glass case, the Man Without A Country.

  We held up our passports in his face, we wept for him.

  They are dumping animal blood into the sea

  to bring up the sharks. Sometimes every

  aperture of my body

  leaks blood. I don’t know whether

  to pretend that this is natural.

  Is there a law about this, a law of nature?

  You worship the blood

  you call it hysterical bleeding

  you want to drink it like milk

  you dip your finger into it and write

  you faint at the smell of it

  you dream of dumping me into the sea.

  3.

  The tragedy of sex

  lies around us, a woodlot

  the axes are sharpened for.

  The old shelters and huts

  stare through the clearing with a certain resolution

  —the hermit’s cabin, the hunters’ shack—

  scenes of masturbation

  and dirty jokes.

  A man’s world. But finished.

  They themselves have sold it to the machines.

  I walk the unconscious forest,

  a woman dressed in old army fatigues

  that have shrunk to fit her, I am lost

  at moments, I feel dazed

  by the sun pawing between the trees,

  cold in the bog and lichen of the thicket.

  Nothing will save this. I am alone,

  kicking the last rotting logs

  with their strange smell of life, not death,

  wondering what on earth it all might have become.

  4.

  Clarity,

  spray

  blinding and purging

  spears of sun striking the water

  the bodies riding the air

  like gliders

  the bodies in slow motion

  falling

  into the pool

  at the Berlin Olympics

  control; loss of control

  the bodies rising

  arching back to the tower

  time reeling backward

  clarity of open air

  before the dark chambers

  with the shower-heads

  the bodies falling again

  freely

  faster than light

  the water opening

  like air

  like realization

  A woman made this film

  against

  the law

  of gravity

  5.

  All night dreaming of a body

  space weighs on differently from mine

  We are making love in the street

  the traffic flows off from us

  pouring back like a sheet
/>
  the asphalt stirs with tenderness

  there is no dismay

  we move together like underwater plants

  Over and over, starting to wake

  I dive back to discover you

  still whispering, touch me, we go on

  streaming through the slow

  citylight forest ocean

  stirring our body hair

  But this is the saying of a dream

  on waking

  I wish there were somewhere

  actual we could stand

  handing the power-glasses back and forth

  looking at the earth, the wildwood

  where the split began

  1971

  INCIPIENCE

  1.To live, to lie awake

  under scarred plaster

  while ice is forming over the earth

  at an hour when nothing can be done

  to further any decision

  to know the composing of the thread

  inside the spider’s body

  first atoms of the web

  visible tomorrow

  to feel the fiery future

  of every matchstick in the kitchen

  Nothing can be done

  but by inches. I write out my life

  hour by hour, word by word

  gazing into the anger of old women on the bus

  numbering the striations

  of air inside the ice cube

  imagining the existence

  of something uncreated

  this poem

  our lives

  2.A man is asleep in the next room

  We are his dreams

  We have the heads and breasts of women

  the bodies of birds of prey

  Sometimes we turn into silver serpents

  While we sit up smoking and talking of how to live

  he turns on the bed and murmurs

  A man is asleep in the next room

  A neurosurgeon enters his dream

  and begins to dissect his brain

 

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