Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  es peligrosa

  many sleep

  the whole way

  others sit

  staring holes of fire into the air

  others plan rebellion:

  night after night

  awake in prison, my mind

  licked at the mattress like a flame

  till the cellblock went up roaring

  Thoreau setting fire to the woods

  Every act of becoming conscious

  (it says here in this book)

  is an unnatural act

  1972

  III

  I saw a beggar leaning on his crutch,

  He said to me: Why do you ask for so much?

  I saw a woman leaning on a door,

  She said, Why not, why not, why not ask for more?

  —Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on the Wire” (as sung by Judy Collins)

  MERCED

  Fantasies of old age:

  they have rounded us up

  in a rest-camp for the outworn.

  Somewhere in some dustbowl

  a barbed-wire cantonment

  of low-cost dustcolored prefab

  buildings, smelling of shame

  and hopeless incontinence

  identical clothes of disposable

  paper, identical rations

  of chemically flavored food

  Death in order, by gas,

  hypodermics daily

  to neutralize despair

  So I imagine my world

  in my seventieth year alive

  and outside the barbed wire

  a purposeless exchange

  of consciousness for the absence

  of pain. We will call this life.

  Yet only last summer I

  burned my feet in the sand

  of that valley traced by the thread

  of the cold quick river Merced

  watered by plummets of white

  When I swam, my body ached

  from the righteous cold

  when I lay back floating the jays

  flittered from pine to pine

  and the shade moved hour by hour

  across El Capitan

  Our wine cooled in the water

  and I watched my sons, half-men

  half-children, testing their part

  in a world almost archaic

  so precious by this time

  that merely to step in pure water

  or stare into clear air

  is to feel a spasm of pain.

  For weeks now a rage

  has possessed my body, driving

  now out upon men and women

  now inward upon myself

  Walking Amsterdam Avenue

  I find myself in tears

  without knowing which thought

  forced water to my eyes

  To speak to another human

  becomes a risk

  I think of Norman Morrison

  the Buddhists of Saigon

  the black teacher last week

  who put himself to death

  to waken guilt in hearts

  too numb to get the message

  in a world masculinity made

  unfit for women or men

  Taking off in a plane

  I look down at the city

  which meant life to me, not death

  and think that somewhere there

  a cold center, composed

  of pieces of human beings

  metabolized, restructured

  by a process they do not feel

  is spreading in our midst

  and taking over our minds

  a thing that feels neither guilt

  nor rage: that is unable

  to hate, therefore to love.

  1972

  A PRIMARY GROUND

  But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his sense restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life …

  —Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

  And this is how you live: a woman, children

  protect you from the abyss

  you move near, turning on the news

  eating Thanksgiving with its pumpkin teeth

  drinking the last wine

  from the cellar of your wedding

  It all seems innocent enough, this sin

  of wedlock: you, your wife, your children

  leaning across the unfilled plates

  passing the salt

  down a cloth ironed by a woman

  with aching legs

  Now they go out to play

  in the coarse, rough November air

  that smells of soft-coal smoke, the river,

  burnt sweet-potato pie.

  Sensuality dessicates in words—

  risks of the portage, risks of the glacier

  never taken

  Protection is the genius of your house

  the pressure of the steam iron

  flattens the linen cloth again

  chestnuts puréed with care are dutifully eaten

  in every room the furniture reflects you

  larger than life, or dwindling

  Emptiness

  thrust like a batch of letters to the furthest

  dark of a drawer

  But there is something else:

  your wife’s twin sister, speechless

  is dying in the house

  You and your wife take turns

  carrying up the trays,

  understanding her case, trying to make her understand.

  1972

  TRANSLATIONS

  You show me the poems of some woman

  my age, or younger

  translated from your language

  Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow

  enough to let me know

  she’s a woman of my time

  obsessed

  with Love, our subject:

  we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls

  baked it like bread in our ovens

  worn it like lead on our ankles

  watched it through binoculars as if

  it were a helicopter

  bringing food to our famine

  or the satellite

  of a hostile power

  I begin to see that woman

  doing things: stirring rice

  ironing a skirt

  typing a manuscript till dawn

  trying to make a call

  from a phonebooth

  The phone rings unanswered

  in a man’s bedroom

  she hears him telling someone else

  Never mind. She’ll get tired.

  hears him telling her story to her sister

  who becomes her enemy

  and will in her own time

  light her own way to sorrow

  ignorant of the fact this way of grief

  is shared, unnecessary

  and political

  1972

  LIVING IN THE CAVE

  Reading the Parable of the Cave

  While living in the cave,

  black moss

  deadening my footsteps

  candles stuck on rock-ledges

  weakening my eyes

  These things around me, with their

  daily requirements:

  fill me, empty me

  talk to me, warm me, let me

  suck on you

  Every one of them has a plan that depends on me

  stalactites want to become

  stalagmites

  veins of ore

  imagine their preciousness

  candles see themselves disembodied

  into gas

  and taking flight

  the bat hangs dreaming

  of an airy world

  None of them, not one

  sees me

  as I see them

&nbs
p; 1972

  THE NINTH SYMPHONY

  OF BEETHOVEN UNDERSTOOD AT LAST

  AS A SEXUAL MESSAGE

  A man in terror of impotence

  or infertility, not knowing the difference

  a man trying to tell something

  howling from the climacteric

  music of the entirely

  isolated soul

  yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego

  music without the ghost

  of another person in it, music

  trying to tell something the man

  does not want out, would keep if he could

  gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy

  where everything is silence and the

  beating of a bloody fist upon

  a splintered table

  1972

  RAPE

  There is a cop who is both prowler and father:

  he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,

  had certain ideals.

  You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,

  on horseback, one hand touching his gun.

  You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:

  he has access to machinery that could kill you.

  He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,

  his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud

  from between his unsmiling lips.

  And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,

  the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,

  your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess

  to him, you are guilty of the crime

  of having been forced.

  And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family

  whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,

  his hand types out the details

  and he wants them all

  but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.

  You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:

  he has taken down your worst moment

  on a machine and filed it in a file.

  He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;

  he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.

  He has access to machinery that could get you put away:

  and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

  and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

  your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,

  will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

  1972

  BURNING ONESELF IN

  In a bookstore on the East Side

  I read a veteran’s testimony:

  the running down, for no reason

  of an old woman in South Vietnam

  by a U.S. Army truck

  The heat-wave is over

  Lifeless, sunny, the East Side

  rests under its awnings

  Another summer

  The flames go on feeding

  and a dull heat permeates the ground

  of the mind, the burn has settled in

  as if it had no more question

  of its right to go on devouring

  the rest of a lifetime,

  the rest of history

  Pieces of information, like this one

  blow onto the heap

  they keep it fed, whether we will it or not,

  another summer, and another

  of suffering quietly

  in bookstores, in the parks

  however we may scream we are

  suffering quietly

  1972

  BURNING ONESELF OUT

  For E.K.

  We can look into the stove tonight

  as into a mirror, yes,

  the serrated log, the yellow-blue

  gaseous core

  the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes,

  I know inside my eyelids

  and underneath my skin

  Time takes hold of us like a draft

  upward, drawing at the heats

  in the belly, in the brain

  You told me of setting your hand

  into the print of a long-dead Indian

  and for a moment, I knew that hand,

  that print, that rock,

  that sun producing powerful dreams

  A word can do this

  or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire

  of my mind, burning as if it could go on

  burning itself, burning down

  feeding on everything

  till there is nothing in life

  that has not fed that fire

  1972

  FOR A SISTER

  Natalya Gorbanevskaya, two years incarcerated in a Soviet penal mental asylum for her political activism; and others

  I trust none of them. Only my existence

  thrown out in the world like a towchain

  battered and twisted in many chance connections,

  being pulled this way, pulling in that.

  I have to steal the sense of dust on your floor,

  milk souring in your pantry

  after they came and took you.

  I’m forced to guess at the look you threw backward.

  A few paragraphs in the papers,

  allowing for printers’ errors, wilful omissions,

  the trained violence of doctors.

  I don’t trust them, but I’m learning how to use them.

  Little by little out of the blurred conjectures

  your face clears, a sunken marble

  slowly cranked up from underwater.

  I feel the ropes straining under their load of despair.

  They searched you for contraband, they made their notations.

  A look of intelligence could get you twenty years.

  Better to trace nonexistent circles with your finger,

  try to imitate the smile of the permanently dulled.

  My images. This metaphor for what happens.

  A geranium in flames on a green cloth

  becomes yours. You, coming home after years

  to light the stove, get out the typewriter and begin again. Your story.

  1972

  FOR THE DEAD

  I dreamed I called you on the telephone

  to say: Be kinder to yourself

  but you were sick and would not answer

  The waste of my love goes on this way

  trying to save you from yourself

  I have always wondered about the leftover

  energy, water rushing down a hill

  long after the rains have stopped

  or the fire you want to go to bed from

  but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down

  the red coals more extreme, more curious

  in their flashing and dying

  than you wish they were

  sitting there long after midnight

  1972

  FROM A SURVIVOR

  The pact that we made was the ordinary pact

  of men & women in those days

  I don’t know who we thought we were

  that our personalities

  could resist the failures of the race

  Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know

  the race had failures of that order

  and that we were going to share them

  Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

  Your body is as vivid to me

  as it ever was: even more

  since my feeling for it is clearer:

  I know what it could do and could not do

  it is no longer

  the body of a god

  or anything with power over my life

  Next year it would have been 20 years

  and you are wastefully dead

  who might have made the leap

  we talked, too late, of making

  which I live now

  not as a leap

  but
a succession of brief, amazing movements

  each one making possible the next

  1972

  AUGUST

  Two horses in yellow light

  eating windfall apples under a tree

  as summer tears apartmilkweeds stagger

  and grasses grow more ragged

  They say there are ions in the sun

  neutralizing magnetic fields on earth

  Some way to explain

  what this week has been, and the one before it!

  If I am flesh sunning on rock

  if I am brain burning in fluorescent light

  if I am dream like a wire with fire

  throbbing along it

  if I am death to man

  I have to know it

  His mind is too simple, I cannot go on

  sharing his nightmares

  My own are becoming clearer, they open

  into prehistory

  which looks like a village lit with blood

  where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!

  1972

  IV

  Meditations for

  a Savage Child

  MEDITATIONS FOR A SAVAGE CHILD

  The prose passages are from J.-M. Itard’s account of The Wild Boy of Aveyron, as translated by G. and M. Humphrey.

  I

  There was a profound indifference to the objects of our pleasures and of our fictitious needs; there was still … so intense a passion for the freedom of the fields … that he would certainly have escaped into the forest had not the most rigid precautions been taken …