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Collected Poems

Page 26

by Adrienne Rich


  She does not look like a nurse

  she is absorbed in her work

  she has a stern, delicate face like Marie Curie

  She is not/might be either of us

  A man is asleep in the next room

  He has spent a whole day

  standing, throwing stones into the black pool

  which keeps its blackness

  Outside the frame of his dream we are stumbling up the hill

  hand in hand, stumbling and guiding each other

  over the scarred volcanic rock

  1971

  AFTER TWENTY YEARS

  For A.P.C.

  Two women sit at a table by a window. Light breaks

  unevenly on both of them.

  Their talk is a striking of sparks

  which passers-by in the street observe

  as a glitter in the glass of that window.

  Two women in the prime of life.

  Their babies are old enough to have babies.

  Loneliness has been part of their story for twenty years,

  the dark edge of the clever tongue,

  the obscure underside of the imagination.

  It is snow and thunder in the street.

  While they speak the lightning flashes purple.

  it is strange to be so many women,

  eating and drinking at the same table,

  those who bathed their children in the same basin

  who kept their secrets from each other

  walked the floors of their lives in separate rooms

  and flow into history now as the woman of their time

  living in the prime of life

  as in a city where nothing is forbidden

  and nothing permanent.

  1971

  THE MIRROR IN WHICH TWO ARE SEEN AS ONE

  1.

  She is the one you call sister.

  Her simplest act has glamour,

  as when she scales a fish the knife

  flashes in her long fingers

  no motion wasted or when

  rapidly talking of love

  she steel-wool burnishes

  the battered kettle

  Love-apples cramp you sideways

  with sudden emptiness

  the cereals glutting you, the grains

  ripe clusters picked by hand

  Love: the refrigerator

  with open door

  the ripe steaks bleeding

  their hearts out in plastic film

  the whipped butter, the apricots

  the sour leftovers

  A crate is waiting in the orchard

  for you to fill it

  your hands are raw with scraping

  the sharp bark, the thorns

  of this succulent tree

  Pick, pick, pick

  this harvest is a failure

  the juice runs down your cheekbones

  like sweat or tears

  2.

  She is the one you call sister

  you blaze like lightning about the room

  flicker around her like fire

  dazzle yourself in her wide eyes

  listing her unfelt needs

  thrusting the tenets of your life

  into her hands

  She moves through a world of India print

  her body dappled

  with softness, the paisley swells at her hip

  walking the street in her cotton shift

  buying fresh figs because you love them

  photographing the ghetto because you took her there

  Why are you crying dry up your tears

  we are sisters

  words fail you in the stare of her hunger

  you hand her another book

  scored by your pencil

  you hand her a record

  of two flutes in India reciting

  3.

  Late summer night the insects

  fry in the yellowed lightglobe

  your skin burns gold in its light

  In this mirror, who are you? Dreams of the nunnery

  with its discipline, the nursery

  with its nurse, the hospital

  where all the powerful ones are masked

  the graveyard where you sit on the graves

  of women who died in childbirth

  and women who died at birth

  Dreams of your sister’s birth

  your mother dying in childbirth over and over

  not knowing how to stop

  bearing you over and over

  your mother dead and you unborn

  your two hands grasping your head

  drawing it down against the blade of life

  your nerves the nerves of a midwife

  learning her trade

  1971

  FROM THE PRISON HOUSE

  Underneath my lids another eye has opened

  it looks nakedly

  at the light

  that soaks in from the world of pain

  even when I sleep

  Steadily it regards

  everything I am going through

  and more

  it sees the clubs and rifle-butts

  rising and falling

  it sees

  detail not on TV

  the fingers of the policewoman

  searching the cunt of the young prostitute

  it sees

  the roaches dropping into the pan

  where they cook the pork

  in the House of D

  it sees

  the violence

  embedded in silence

  This eye

  is not for weeping

  its vision

  must be unblurred

  though tears are on my face

  its intent is clarity

  it must forget

  nothing

  September 1971

  THE STRANGER

  Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart

  of the street to the river

  walking the rivers of the avenues

  feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt

  watching the lights turn on in the towers

  walking as I’ve walked before

  like a man, like a woman, in the city

  my visionary anger cleansing my sight

  and the detailed perceptions of mercy

  flowering from that anger

  if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light

  and hear them talking a dead language

  if they ask me my identity

  what can I say but

  I am the androgyne

  I am the living mind you fail to describe

  in your dead language

  the lost noun, the verb surviving

  only in the infinitive

  the letters of my name are written under the lids

  of the newborn child

  1972

  SONG

  You’re wondering if I’m lonely:

  OK then, yes, I’m lonely

  as a plane rides lonely and level

  on its radio beam, aiming

  across the Rockies

  for the blue-strung aisles

  of an airfield on the ocean

  You want to ask, am I lonely?

  Well, of course, lonely

  as a woman driving across country

  day after day, leaving behind

  mile after mile

  little towns she might have stopped

  and lived and died in, lonely

  If I’m lonely

  it must be the loneliness

  of waking first, of breathing

  dawn’s first cold breath on the city

  of being the one awake

  in a house wrapped in sleep

  If I’m lonely

  it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore

  in the last red light of the year

  that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither

  ice nor
mud nor winter light

  but wood, with a gift for burning

  1971

  DIALOGUE

  She sits with one hand poised against her head, the

  other turning an old ring to the light

  for hours our talk has beaten

  like rain against the screens

  a sense of August and heat-lightning

  I get up, go to make tea, come back

  we look at each other

  then she says (and this is what I live through

  over and over)—she says: I do not know

  if sex is an illusion

  I do not know

  who I was when I did those things

  or who I said I was

  or whether I willed to feel

  what I had read about

  or who in fact was there with me

  or whether I knew, even then

  that there was doubt about these things

  1972

  DIVING INTO THE WRECK

  First having read the book of myths,

  and loaded the camera,

  and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

  I put on

  the body-armor of black rubber

  the absurd flippers

  the grave and awkward mask.

  I am having to do this

  not like Cousteau with his

  assiduous team

  aboard the sun-flooded schooner

  but here alone.

  There is a ladder.

  The ladder is always there

  hanging innocently

  close to the side of the schooner.

  We know what it is for,

  we who have used it.

  Otherwise

  it’s a piece of maritime floss

  some sundry equipment.

  I go down.

  Rung after rung and still

  the oxygen immerses me

  the blue light

  the clear atoms

  of our human air.

  I go down.

  My flippers cripple me,

  I crawl like an insect down the ladder

  and there is no one

  to tell me when the ocean

  will begin.

  First the air is blue and then

  it is bluer and then green and then

  black I am blacking out and yet

  my mask is powerful

  it pumps my blood with power

  the sea is another story

  the sea is not a question of power

  I have to learn alone

  to turn my body without force

  in the deep element.

  And now: it is easy to forget

  what I came for

  among so many who have always

  lived here

  swaying their crenellated fans

  between the reefs

  and besides

  you breathe differently down here.

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  I came to see the damage that was done

  and the treasures that prevail.

  I stroke the beam of my lamp

  slowly along the flank

  of something more permanent

  than fish or weed

  the thing I came for:

  the wreck and not the story of the wreck

  the thing itself and not the myth

  the drowned face always staring

  toward the sun

  the evidence of damage

  worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

  the ribs of the disaster

  curving their assertion

  among the tentative haunters.

  This is the place.

  And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

  streams black, the merman in his armored body

  We circle silently

  about the wreck

  we dive into the hold.

  I am she: I am he

  whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

  whose breasts still bear the stress

  whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

  obscurely inside barrels

  half-wedged and left to rot

  we are the half-destroyed instruments

  that once held to a course

  the water-eaten log

  the fouled compass

  We are, I am, you are

  by cowardice or courage

  the one who find our way

  back to this scene

  carrying a knife, a camera

  a book of myths

  in which

  our names do not appear.

  1972

  II

  The Phenomenology

  of Anger

  THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ANGER

  1. The freedom of the wholly mad

  to smear & play with her madness

  write with her fingers dipped in it

  the length of a room

  which is not, of course, the freedom

  you have, walking on Broadway

  to stop & turn back or go on

  10 blocks; 20 blocks

  but feels enviable maybe

  to the compromised

  curled in the placenta of the real

  which was to feed & which is strangling her.

  2. Trying to light a log that’s lain in the damp

  as long as this house has stood:

  even with dry sticks I can’t get started

  even with thorns.

  I twist last year into a knot of old headlines

  —this rose won’t bloom.

  How does a pile of rags the machinist wiped his hands on

  feel in its cupboard, hour upon hour?

  Each day during the heat-wave

  they took the temperature of the haymow.

  I huddled fugitive

  in the warm sweet simmer of the hay

  muttering: Come.

  3. Flat heartland of winter.

  The moonmen come back from the moon

  the firemen come out of the fire.

  Time without a taste: time without decisions.

  Self-hatred, a monotone in the mind.

  The shallowness of a life lived in exile

  even in the hot countries.

  Cleaver, staring into a window full of knives.

  4. White light splits the room.

  Table.Window.Lampshade.You.

  My hands, sticky in a new way.

  Menstrual blood

  seeming to leak from your side.

  Will the judges try to tell me

  which was the blood of whom?

  5. Madness.Suicide.Murder.

  Is there no way out but these?

  The enemy, always just out of sight

  snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded

  in a snowy blur, abominable snowman

  —at once the most destructive

  and the most elusive being

  gunning down the babies at My Lai

  vanishing in the face of confrontation.

  The prince of air and darkness

  computing body counts, masturbating

  in the factory

  of facts.

  6. Fantasies of murder: not enough:

  to kill is to cut off from pain

  but the killer goes on hurting

  Not enough. When I dream of meeting

  the enemy, this is my dream:

  white acetylene

  ripples from my body

  effortlessly released

  perfectly trained

  on the true enemy

  raking his body down to the thread

  of existence

  burning away his lie

  leaving him in a new

  world; a changed

  man

  7. I suddenly see the world

  as no longer viable:

  you are out there burning the crops

  with some new
sublimate

  This morning you left the bed

  we still share

  and went out to spread impotence

  upon the world

  I hate you.

  I hate the mask you wear, your eyes

  assuming a depth

  they do not possess, drawing me

  into the grotto of your skull

  the landscape of bone

  I hate your words

  they make me think of fake

  revolutionary bills

  crisp imitation parchment

  they sell at battlefields.

  Last night, in this room, weeping

  I asked you: what are you feeling?

  do you feel anything?

  Now in the torsion of your body

  as you defoliate the fields we lived from

  I have your answer.

  8. Dogeared earth. Wormeaten moon.

  A pale cross-hatching of silver

  lies like a wire screen on the black

  water. All these phenomena

  are temporary.

  I would have loved to live in a world

  of women and men gaily

  in collusion with green leaves, stalks,

  building mineral cities, transparent domes,

  little huts of woven grass

  each with its own pattern—

  a conspiracy to coexist

  with the Crab Nebula, the exploding

  universe, the Mind—

  9. The only real love I have ever felt

  was for children and other women.

  Everything else was lust, pity,

  self-hatred, pity, lust.

  This is a woman’s confession.

  Now, look again at the face

  of Botticelli’s Venus, Kali,

  the Judith of Chartres

  with her so-called smile.

  10. how we are burning up our lives

  testimony:

  the subway

  hurtling to Brooklyn

  her head on her knees

  asleep or drugged

  la vía del tren subterráneo

 

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