Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 28

by Adrienne Rich


  In their own way, by their own lights

  they tried to care for you

  tried to teach you to care

  for objects of their caring:

  glossed oak planks, glass

  whirled in a fire

  to impossible thinness

  to teach you names

  for things

  you did not need

  muslin shirred against the sun

  linen on a sack of feathers

  locks, keys

  boxes with coins inside

  they tried to make you feel

  the importance of

  a piece of cowhide

  sewn around a bundle

  of leaves impressed with signs

  to teach you language:

  the thread their lives

  were strung on

  II

  When considered from a more general and philosophic point of view, these scars bear witness … against the feebleness and insufficiency of man when left entirely to himself, and in favor of the resources of nature which … work openly to repair and conserve that which she tends secretly to impair and destroy.

  I keep thinking about the lesson of the human ear

  which stands for music, which stands for balance—

  or the cat’s ear which I can study better

  the whorls and ridges exposed

  It seems a hint dropped about the inside of the skull

  which I cannot see

  lobe, zone, that part of the brain

  which is pure survival

  The most primitive part

  I go back into at night

  pushing the leathern curtain

  with naked fingers

  then

  with naked body

  There where every wound is registered

  as scar tissue

  A cave of scars!

  ancient, archaic wallpaper

  built up, layer on layer

  from the earliest, dream-white

  to yesterday’s, a red-black scrawl

  a red mouth slowly closing

  Go back so far there is another language

  go back far enough the language

  is no longer personal

  these scars bear witness

  but whether to repair

  or to destruction

  I no longer know

  III

  It is true that there is visible on the throat a very extended scar which might throw some doubt upon the soundness of the underlying parts if one were not reassured by the appearance of the scar …

  When I try to speak

  my throat is cut

  and, it seems, by his hand

  The sounds I make are prehuman, radical

  the telephone is always

  ripped-out

  and he sleeps on

  Yet always the tissue

  grows over, white as silk

  hardly a blemish

  maybe a hieroglyph for scream

  Child, no wonder you never wholly

  trusted your keepers

  IV

  A hand with the will rather than the habit of crime had wished to make an attempt on the life of this child … left for dead in the woods, he will have owed the prompt recovery of his wound to the help of nature alone.

  In the 18th century infanticide

  reaches epidemic proportions:

  old prints attest to it: starving mothers

  smothering babies in sleep

  abandoning newborns in sleet

  on the poorhouse steps

  gin-blurred, setting fire to the room

  I keep thinking of the flights we used to take

  on the grapevine across the gully

  littered with beer-bottles where dragonflies flashed

  we were 10, 11 years old

  wild little girls with boyish bodies

  flying over the moist

  shadow-mottled earth

  till they warned us to stay away from there

  Later they pointed out

  the venetian blinds

  of the abortionist’s house

  we shivered

  Men can do things to you

  was all they said

  V

  And finally, my Lord, looking at this long experiment … whether it be considered as the methodical education of a savage or as no more than the physical and moral treatment of one of those creatures ill-favored by nature, rejected by society and abandoned by medicine, the care that has been taken and ought still to be taken of him, the changes that have taken place, and those that can be hoped for, the voice of humanity, the interest inspired by such a desertion and a destiny so strange—all these things recommend this extraordinary young man to the attention of scientists, to the solicitude of administrators, and to the protection of the government.

  1.The doctor in “Uncle Vanya”:

  They will call us fools,

  blind, ignorant, they will

  despise us

  devourers of the forest

  leaving teeth of metal in every tree

  so the tree can neither grow

  nor be cut for lumber

  Does the primeval forest

  weep

  for its devourers

  does nature mourn

  our existence

  is the child with arms

  burnt to the flesh of its sides

  weeping eyelessly for man

  2.At the end of the distinguished doctor’s

  lecture

  a young woman raises her hand:

  You have the power

  in your hands, you control our lives—

  why do you want our pity too?

  Why are men afraid

  why do you pity yourselves

  why do the administrators

  lack solicitude, the government

  refuse protection,

  why should the wild child

  weep for the scientists

  why

  1972

  POEMS

  (1973–1974)

  DIEN BIEN PHU

  A nurse on the battlefield

  wounded herself, but working

  dreams

  that each man she touches

  is a human grenade

  an anti-personnel weapon

  that can explode in her arms

  How long

  can she go on like this

  putting mercy

  ahead of survival

  She is walking

  in a white dress stained

  with earth and blood

  down a road lined

  with fields long

  given upblasted

  cemeteries of one name

  or two

  A hand

  juts out like barbed wire

  it is terribly alone

  if she takes it

  will it slash her wrists again

  if she passes it by

  will she turn into a case

  of shell-shock, eyes

  glazed forever on the

  blank chart of

  amnesia

  1973

  ESSENTIAL RESOURCES

  I don’t know

  how late it is. I’m writing

  with a chewed blunted lead

  under a bridge while snow blankets the city

  or with a greasy ballpoint

  the nurse left

  in a ward of amnesiacs who can be trusted

  not to take notes

  You talk of a film we could make

  with women’s faces naked

  of make-up, the mist of sweat

  on a forehead, lips dry

  the little bloodspot from a coldsore

  I know the inmates are encouraged

  to express themselves

  I’m wondering how

  I long to create something

  that can’t be used to keep us passive:

  I want to write

  a script about plumbing, how e
very pipe

  is joined

  to every other

  the wash of pure water and sewage

  side by side

  or about the electrical system

  a study of the sources of energy

  till in the final shot

  the whole screen goes dark

  and the keepers of order are screaming

  I forget

  what year it is. I am thinking

  of films we have made but cannot show

  yet, films of the mind unfolding

  and our faces, still young

  sweated with desire and

  premature clarity

  1973

  BLOOD-SISTER

  For Cynthia

  Shoring up the ocean. A railroad track

  ran close to the coast for miles

  through the potato-fields, bringing us

  to summer. Weeds blur the ties,

  sludge clots the beaches.

  During the war, the shells we found—

  salmon-and-silver coins

  sand dollars dripping sand

  like dust. We were dressed

  in navy dotted-swiss dresses in the train

  not to show the soot. Like dolls

  we sat with our dolls in the station.

  When did we begin to dress ourselves?

  Now I’m wearing jeans spider-webbed

  with creases, a black sweater bought years ago

  worn almost daily since

  the ocean has undergone a tracheotomy

  and lost its resonance

  you wear a jersey the color of

  Navaho turquoise and sand

  you are holding a naked baby girl

  she laughs into your eyes

  we sit at your table drinking coffee

  light flashes off unwashed sheetglass

  you are more beautiful than you have ever been

  we talk of destruction and creation

  ice fits itself around each twig of the lilac

  like a fist of law and order

  your imagination burns like a bulb in the frozen soil

  the fierce shoots knock

  at the roof of waiting

  when summer comes the ocean may be closed for good

  we will turn

  to the desert

  where survival

  takes naked and fiery forms

  1973

  THE WAVE

  For J.B.

  To give you back this wave

  I would have to give back

  the black

  spaces

  fretted with film of spray,

  darker and deeper than the mind

  they are emblems of

  Not only the creator fury

  of the whitest churn

  the caldron of all life

  but the blankness underlying

  Thinking of the sea I think of light

  lacing, lancing the water

  the blue knife of a radiant consciousness

  bent by the waves of vision as it pierces

  to the deepest grotto

  And I think of those lives we tried to live

  in our globed helmets, self-enclosed

  bodies self-illumined gliding

  safe from the turbulence

  and how, miraculously, we failed

  1973

  RE-FORMING THE CRYSTAL

  I am trying to imagine

  how it feels to you

  to want a woman

  trying to hallucinate

  desire

  centered in a cock

  focused like a burning-glass

  desire without discrimination:

  to want a woman like a fix

  Desire: yes: the sudden knowledge, like coming out of ’flu, that the body is sexual. Walking in the streets with that knowledge. That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh, fantasizing going to meet you. Walking through the airport blazing with energy and joy. But knowing all along that you were not the source of that energy and joy; you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine, this energy my energy; it could be used a hundred ways, and going to meet you could be one of them.

  Tonight is a different kind of night.

  I sit in the car, racing the engine,

  calculating the thinness of the ice.

  In my head I am already threading the beltways

  that rim this city,

  all the old roads that used to wander the country

  having been lost.

  Tonight I understand

  my photo on the license is not me,

  my

  name on the marriage-contract was not mine.

  If I remind you of my father’s favorite daughter,

  look again. The woman

  I needed to call my mother

  was silenced before I was born.

  Tonight if the battery charges I want to take the car out on sheet-ice; I want to understand my fear both of the machine and of the accidents of nature. My desire for you is not trivial; I can compare it with the greatest of those accidents. But the energy it draws on might lead to racing a cold engine, cracking the frozen spiderweb, parachuting into the field of a poem wired with danger, or to a trip through gorges and canyons, into the cratered night of female memory, where delicately and with intense care the chieftainess inscribes upon the ribs of the volcano the name of the one she has chosen.

  1973

  THE FOURTH MONTH OF THE

  LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT

  It is asleep in my body.

  For now, I am myself,

  like anyone, like a man

  whose body contains simply: itself.

  I draw a too-big sweater

  over my breasts, walk into the drafting-room

  and stand there, balancing.

  The sun sprays acid points of light

  on the tools of my trade, the metal,

  the edged instruments. My work has always been

  with edges. For a while I listen:

  will there be a knock, is the neighbor

  so near me stirring behind his walls?

  The neighbor is quiet. I am not

  a body, I am no body, I am I,

  a pair of hands ending in fingers

  that think like a brain.

  I draw a sheet of paper toward me

  on the slanted drafting-table.

  I start to imagine

  plans for a house, a park

  stretching in every direction to the horizon

  which is no horizon

  which is merely a circle of volcanoes.

  I touch stylus, T-square, pens

  of immeasurable fineness,

  the hard-edge. I am I,

  this India ink my rain

  which can irrigate gardens, terraces

  dissolve or project horizons

  flowing like lava from the volcano of the inkpot

  at the stirring of my mind.

  A city waits at the back of my skull

  eating its heart out to be born:

  how design the first

  city of the moon? how shall I see it

  for all of us who are done

  with enclosed spaces, purdah, the salon, the sweatshop loft,

  the ingenuity of the cloister?

  My mind flies at the moon

  beating, a pale-green kite.

  Something else is beating.

  In my body.

  Spaces fold in. I’m caught

  in the enclosure of the crib my body

  where every thought I think

  simply loosens to life another life.

  1973

  THE ALLEGED MURDERESS

  WALKING IN HER CELL

  Nine months we conspired:

  first in panic, then in a quieter dread,

  finally an unfamiliar kind of peace.

  In the new year voices began,

  they said I’d helped beat a man to death,

  even my
lover said so.

  You were no bigger than a cyst

  then, a bead of life

  lit from within.

  I took that life in my hands

  with mine; a key turned

  and the voices shrank away.

  Then began that whispered conversation

  telling each other we were alive,

  twins in the prison womb,

  exchanging vows against the future.

  Justice, they say, and clemency

  installed our nursery in the house

  of detention. I don’t know what

  it means, that we have each other.

  Do they mean to—can they use you

  against me? I walk up and down

  more at peace than in any prison night

  here or outside—

  your warmth washing into my ribcage

  your frail silken skull asleep against my throat

  your anxious pleading stilled—

  unable to remember

  whether or not I ever killed

  whether I ever lived

  without this—the blue pulse of your life

  with its blind stroke: Not-Guilty

  fledging my twenty-one-year life

  of unmeaning, my worthless life

  they framed in their contempt.

  1973

  WHITE NIGHT

  Light at a window. Someone up

  at this snail-still hour.

  We who work this way have often worked

  in solitude. I’ve had to guess at her

  sewing her skin together as I sew mine

  though

  with a different

  stitch.

  Dawn after dawn, this neighbor

  burns like a candle

  dragging her bedspread through the dark house

  to her dark bed

  her head

 

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