Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 31

by Adrienne Rich


  The passion to be inscribes her body.

  Until we find each other, we are alone.

  1974–1975

  TO A POET

  Ice splitsunder the metal

  shovelanother day

  hazed light off fogged panes

  cruelty of winterlandlockedyour life

  wrapped round youin your twenties

  an old bathrobedragged down

  with milkstainstearstainsdust

  Scraping eggcrust from the child’s

  dried dishskimming the skin

  from cooled milkwringing diapers

  Language floats at the vanishing-point

  incarnatebreathes the fluorescent bulb

  primarystates the scarred grain of the floor

  and on the ceiling in torn plaster laughsimago

  and I have fears that you will cease to be

  before your pen has glean’d your teeming brain

  for you are not a suicide

  but no-one calls this murder

  Small mouths, needy, suck you: This is love

  I write thisnot for you

  who fight to write your own

  wordsfighting up the falls

  but for another womandumb

  with lonelinessdustseeping plastic bags

  with children in a house

  where language floats and spins

  abortionin

  the bowl

  1974

  CARTOGRAPHIES OF SILENCE

  1.

  A conversation begins

  with a lie. And each

  speaker of the so-called common language feels

  the ice-floe split, the drift apart

  as if powerless, as if up against

  a force of nature

  A poem can begin

  with a lie. And be torn up.

  A conversation has other laws

  recharges itself with its own

  false energy. Cannot be torn

  up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

  Inscribes with its unreturning stylus

  the isolation it denies.

  2.

  The classical music station

  playing hour upon hour in the apartment

  the picking up and picking up

  and again picking up the telephone

  The syllables uttering

  the old script over and over

  The loneliness of the liar

  living in the formal network of the lie

  twisting the dials to drown the terror

  beneath the unsaid word

  3.

  The technology of silence

  The rituals, etiquette

  the blurring of terms

  silence not absence

  of words or music or even

  raw sounds

  Silence can be a plan

  rigorously executed

  the blueprint to a life

  It is a presence

  it has a history aform

  Do not confuse it

  with any kind of absence

  4.

  How calm, how inoffensive these words

  begin to seem to me

  though begun in grief and anger

  Can I break through this film of the abstract

  without wounding myself or you

  there is enough pain here

  This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays?

  to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

  5.

  The silence that strips bare:

  In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan

  Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography

  mutely surveyed by the camera

  If there were a poetry where this could happen

  not as blank spaces or as words

  stretched like a skin over meanings

  but as silence falls at the end

  of a night through which two people

  have talked till dawn

  6.

  The scream

  of an illegitimate voice

  It has ceased to hear itself, therefore

  it asks itself

  How dó I exist?

  This was the silence I wanted to break in you

  I had questions but you would not answer

  I had answers but you could not use them

  This is useless to you and perhaps to others

  7.

  It was an old theme even for me:

  Language cannot do everything—

  chalk it on the walls where the dead poets

  lie in their mausoleums

  If at the will of the poet the poem

  could turn into a thing

  a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head

  alight with dew

  If it could simply look you in the face

  with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

  till you, and I who long to make this thing,

  were finally clarified together in its stare

  8.

  No. Let me have this dust,

  these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

  moving with ferocious accuracy

  like the blind child’s fingers

  or the newborn infant’s mouth

  violent with hunger

  No one can give me, I have long ago

  taken this method

  whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack

  or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

  If from time to time I envy

  the pure annunciations to the eye

  the visio beatifica

  if from time to time I long to turn

  like the Eleusinian hierophant

  holding up a simple ear of grain

  for return to the concrete and everlasting world

  what in fact I keep choosing

  are these words, these whispers, conversations

  from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

  1975

  THE LIONESS

  The scent of her beauty draws me to her place.

  The desert stretches, edge from edge.

  Rock. Silver grasses. Drinking-hole.

  The starry sky.

  The lioness pauses

  in her back-and-forth pacing of three yards square

  and looks at me. Her eyes

  are truthful. They mirror rivers,

  seacoasts, volcanoes, the warmth

  of moon-bathed promontories.

  Under her haunches’ golden hide

  flows an innate, half-abnegated power.

  Her walk

  is bounded. Three square yards

  encompass where she goes.

  In country like this. I say, the problem is always

  one of straying too far, not of staying

  within bounds. There are caves,

  high rocks, you don’t explore. Yet you know

  they exist. Her proud, vulnerable head

  sniffs toward them. It is her country, she

  knows they exist.

  I come towards her in the starlight.

  I look into her eyes

  as one who loves can look.

  entering the space behind her eyeballs,

  leaving myself outside.

  So, at last, through her pupils,

  I see what she is seeing:

  between her and the river’s flood,

  the volcano veiled in rainbow,

  a pen that measures three yards square.

  Lashed bars.

  The cage.

  The penance.

  1975

  II

  Twenty-One Love Poems

  I

  Wherever in this city, screens flicker

  with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,

  victimized hirelings bending to the lash,

  we also have to walk … if simply as we walk

  through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties

  of our own neighborh
oods.

  We need to grasp our lives inseparable

  from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,

  and the red begonia perilously flashing

  from a tenement sill six stories high,

  or the long-legged young girls playing ball

  in the junior highschool playground.

  No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,

  sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,

  dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,

  our animal passion rooted in the city.

  II

  I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

  Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,

  you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:

  our friend the poet comes into my room

  where I’ve been writing for days,

  drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,

  and I want to show her one poem

  which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

  and wake. You’ve kissed my hair

  to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

  I say, a poem I wanted to show someone …

  and I laugh and fall dreaming again

  of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

  to move openly together

  in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

  which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

  III

  Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time

  for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp

  in time tells me we’re not young.

  Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,

  my limbs streaming with a purer joy?

  did I lean from any window over the city

  listening for the future

  as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?

  And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.

  Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark

  of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,

  the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.

  At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.

  At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.

  I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,

  and somehow, each of us will help the other live,

  and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

  IV

  I come home from you through the early light of spring

  flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,

  the Discount Wares, the shoe-store…. I’m lugging my sack

  of groceries, I dash for the elevator

  where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed

  lets the door almost close on me.—For god’s sake hold it!

  I croak at him. —Hysterical, — he breathes my way.

  I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,

  make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone

  singing Here comes the sun…. I open the mail,

  drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,

  my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail

  lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man

  aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:

  My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display

  they keep me constantly awake with the pain …

  Do whatever you can to survive.

  You know, I think that men love wars …

  And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds

  break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,

  and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

  V

  This apartment full of books could crack open

  to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes

  of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face

  the underside of everything you’ve loved—

  the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag

  even the best voices have had to mumble through,

  the silence burying unwanted children—

  women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.

  Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books

  so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;

  yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift

  loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,

  Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,

  and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries—

  of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,

  centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;

  and we still have to stare into the absence

  of men who would not, women who could not, speak

  to our life—this still unexcavated hole

  called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

  VI

  Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—

  only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands

  I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,

  handling power-tools or steering-wheel

  or touching a human face…. Such hands could turn

  the unborn child rightways in the birth canal

  or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship

  through icebergs, or piece together

  the fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup

  bearing on its sides

  figures of ecstatic women striding

  to the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave—

  such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence

  with such restraint, with such a grasp

  of the range and limits of violence

  that violence ever after would be obsolete.

  VII

  What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

  What atonement is this all about?

  —and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.

  Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals,

  that modulated cantata of the wild?

  or, when away from you I try to create you in words,

  am I simply using you, like a river or a war?

  And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars

  to escape writing of the worst thing of all—

  not the crimes of others, not even our own death,

  but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough

  so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem

  mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

  VIII

  I can see myself years back at Sunion,

  hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes

  in woman’s form, limping the long path,

  lying on a headland over the dark sea,

  looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl

  of white told me a wave had struck,

  imagining the pull of that water from that height,

  knowing deliberate suicide wasn’t my métier,

  yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound.

  Well, that’s finished. The woman who cherished

  her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.

  I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,

  but I want to go on from here with you

  fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

  IX

  Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

  I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.

  It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,

  even your face at another age.

  Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—

  a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,

  a key…. Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom

  deserve t
heir glint of recognition. I fear this silence,

  this inarticulate life. I’m waiting

  for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water

  for once, and show me what I can do

  for you, who have often made the unnameable

  nameable for others, even for me.

  X

  Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through

  our cries, our murmured dawn conspiracies

  our telephone calls. She knows—what can she know?

  If in my human arrogance I claim to read

  her eyes, I find there only my own animal thoughts:

  that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort,

  that voices of the psyche drive through the flesh

  further than the dense brain could have foretold,

  that the planetary nights are growing cold for those

  on the same journey who want to touch

  one creature-traveler clear to the end;

  that without tenderness, we are in hell.

  XI

  Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes,

  making them eternally and visibly female.

  No height without depth, without a burning core,

  though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava.

  I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain

  smoking within like the sibyl stooped over her tripod,

  I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path,

  to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp,

  never failing to note the small, jewel-like flower

  unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her,

 

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