Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  I must allow her to be at last

  political in her waysnot in mine

  her urgencies perhapsimpervious to mine

  defining revolution as she defines it

  or, bored to the marrow of her bones

  with “politics”

  bored with the vast boredom of long pain

  small; tiny in fact; in her late sixties

  liking her roomher private life

  living alone perhaps

  no one you could interview

  maybe filling a notebook herself

  with secrets she has never sold

  1980

  MOTHER-IN-LAW

  Tell me something

  you say

  Not: What are you working on now, is there anyone special,

  how is the job

  do you mind coming back to an empty house

  what do you do on Sundays

  Tell me something …

  Some secret

  we both know and have never spoken?

  Some sentence that could flood with light

  your life, mine?

  Tell me what daughters tell their mothers

  everywhere in the world, and I and only I

  even have to ask….

  Tell me something.

  Lately, I hear it: Tell me something true,

  daughter-in-law, before we part,

  tell me something true before I die

  And time was when I tried.

  You married my son, and so

  strange as you are, you’re my daughter

  Tell me….

  I’ve been trying to tell you, mother-in-law

  that I think I’m breaking in two

  and half of me doesn’t even want to love

  I can polish this table to satin because I don’t care

  I am trying to tell you, I envy

  the people in mental hospitals their freedom

  and I can’t live on placebos

  or Valium, like you

  A cut lemon scours the smell of fish away

  You’ll feel better when the children are in school

  I would try to tell you, mother-in-law

  but my anger takes fire from yours and in the oven

  the meal bursts into flames

  Daughter-in-law, before we part

  tell me something true

  I polished the table, mother-in-law

  and scrubbed the knives with half a lemon

  the way you showed me to do

  I wish I could tell you—

  Tell me!

  They think I’m weak and hold

  things back from me. I agreed to this years ago.

  Daughter-in-law, strange as you are,

  tell me something true

  tell me something

  Your son is dead

  ten years, I am a lesbian,

  my children are themselves.

  Mother-in-law, before we part

  shall we try again? Strange as I am,

  strange as you are? What do mothers

  ask their own daughters, everywhere in the world?

  Is there a question?

  Ask me something.

  1980

  HEROINES

  Exceptional

  even deviant

  you draw your long skirts

  across the nineteenth century

  Your mind

  burns long after death

  not like the harbor beacon

  but like a pyre of driftwood

  on the beach

  You are spared

  illiteracy

  death by pneumonia

  teeth which leave the gums

  the seamstress’ clouded eyes

  the mill-girl’s shortening breath

  by a collection

  of circumstances

  soon to be known as

  class privilege

  The law says you can possess nothing

  in a world

  where property is everything

  You belong first to your father

  then to him who

  chooses you

  if you fail to marry

  you are without recourse

  unable to earn

  a workingman’s salary

  forbidden to vote

  forbidden to speak

  in public

  if married you are legally dead

  the law says

  you may not bequeath property

  save to your children

  or male kin

  that your husband

  has the right

  of the slaveholder

  to hunt down and re-possess you

  should you escape

  You may inherit slaves

  but have no power to free them

  your skin is fair

  you have been taught that light

  came

  to the Dark Continent

  with white power

  that the Indians

  live in filth

  and occult animal rites

  Your mother wore corsets

  to choke her spirit

  which if you refuse

  you are jeered for refusing

  you have heard many sermons

  and have carried

  your own interpretations

  locked in your heart

  You are a woman

  strong in health

  through a collection

  of circumstances

  soon to be known

  as class privilege

  which if you break

  the social compact

  you lose outright

  When you open your mouth in public

  human excrement

  is flung at you

  you are exceptional

  in personal circumstance

  in indignation

  you give up believing

  in protection

  in Scripture

  in man-made laws

  respectable as you look

  you are an outlaw

  Your mind burns

  not like the harbor beacon

  but like a fire

  of fiercer origin

  you begin speaking out

  and a great gust of freedom

  rushes in with your words

  yet still you speak

  in the shattered language

  of a partial vision

  You draw your long skirts

  deviant

  across the nineteenth century

  registering injustice

  failing to make it whole

  How can I fail to love

  your clarity and fury

  how can I give you

  all your due

  take courage from your courage

  honor your exact

  legacy as it is

  recognizing

  as well

  that it is not enough?

  1980

  GRANDMOTHERS

  1. Mary Gravely Jones

  We had no petnames, no diminutives for you,

  always the formal guest under my father’s roof:

  you were “Grandmother Jones” and you visited rarely.

  I see you walking up and down the garden,

  restless, southern-accented, reserved, you did not seem

  my mother’s mother or anyone’s grandmother.

  You were Mary, widow of William, and no matriarch,

  yet smoldering to the end with frustrate life,

  ideas nobody listened to, least of all my father.

  One summer night you sat with my sister and me

  in the wooden glider long after twilight,

  holding us there with streams of pent-up words.

  You could quote every poet I had ever heard of,

  had read The Opium Eater, Amiel and Bernard Shaw,

  your green eyes looked clenched against opposition.

  You married straight out of the convent school,
/>   your background was country, you left an unperformed

  typescript of a play about Burr and Hamilton,

  you were impotent and brilliant, no one cared

  about your mind, you might have ended

  elsewhere than in that glider

  reciting your unwritten novels to the children.

  2. Hattie Rice Rich

  Your sweetness of soul was a mystery to me,

  you who slip-covered chairs, glued broken china,

  lived out of a wardrobe trunk in our guestroom

  summer and fall, then took the Pullman train

  in your darkblue dress and straw hat, to Alabama,

  shuttling half-yearly between your son and daughter.

  Your sweetness of soul was a convenience for everyone,

  how you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg,

  fished for hours on a pier, your umbrella spread, took the street-car

  downtown shopping

  endlessly for your son’s whims, the whims of genius,

  kept your accounts in ledgers, wrote letters daily.

  All through World War Two the forbidden word

  Jewish was barely uttered in your son’s house;

  your anger flared over inscrutable things.

  Once I saw you crouched on the guestroom bed,

  knuckles blue-white around the bedpost, sobbing

  your one brief memorable scene of rebellion:

  you didn’t want to go back South that year.

  You were never “Grandmother Rich” but “Anana”;

  you had money of your own but you were homeless,

  Hattie, widow of Samuel, and no matriarch,

  dispersed among the children and grandchildren.

  3. Granddaughter

  Easier to encapsulate your lives

  in a slide-show of impressions given and taken,

  to play the child or victim, the projectionist,

  easier to invent a script for each of you,

  myself still at the center,

  than to write words in which you might have found

  yourselves, looked up at me and said

  “Yes, I was like that; but I was something more….”

  Danville, Virginia; Vicksburg, Mississippi;

  the “war between the states” a living memory

  its aftermath the plague-town closing

  its gates, trying to cure itself with poisons.

  I can almost touch that little town….

  a little white town rimmed with Negroes,

  making a deep shadow on the whiteness.

  Born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind

  —twice an outsider, still believing in inclusion—

  in those defended hamlets of half-truth

  broken in two by one strange idea,

  “blood” the all-powerful, awful theme—

  what were the lessons to be learned? If I believe

  the daughter of one of you—Amnesia was the answer.

  1980

  THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

  For Michelle Cliff

  I.

  Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett

  driving with you in springroad

  like a streambed unwinding downhill

  fiddlehead ferns uncurling

  spring peepers ringing sweet and cold

  while we talk yet again

  of dark and light, of blackness, whiteness, numbness

  rammed through the heart like a stake

  trying to pull apart the threads

  from the dried blood of the old murderous uncaring

  halting on bridges in bloodlight

  where the freshets call out freedom

  to frog-thrilling swamp, skunk-cabbage

  trying to sense the conscience of these hills

  knowing how the single-minded, pure

  solutions bleached and dessicated

  within their perfect flasks

  for it was not enough to be New England

  as every event since has testified:

  New England’s a shadow-country, always was

  it was not enough to be for abolition

  while the spirit of the masters

  flickered in the abolitionist’s heart

  it was not enough to name ourselves anew

  while the spirit of the masters

  calls the freedwoman to forget the slave

  With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

  If there’s a conscience in these hills

  it hurls that question

  unquenched, relentless, to our ears

  wild and witchlike

  ringing every swamp

  II.

  The mountain laurel in bloom

  constructed like needlework

  tiny half-pulled stitches piercing

  flushed and stippled petals

  here in these woods it grows wild

  midsummer moonrise turns it opal

  the night breathes with its clusters

  protected species

  meaning endangered

  Here in these hills

  this valleywe have felt

  a kind of freedom

  planting the soilhave known

  hours of a calm, intense and mutual solitude

  reading and writing

  trying to clarifyconnect

  past and presentnear and far

  the Alabama quilt

  the Botswana basket

  historythe dark crumble

  of last year’s compost

  filtering softly through your living hand

  but here as well we face

  instantaneous violenceambushmale

  dominion on a back road

  to escape in a locked carwindows shut

  skimming the ditchyour split-second

  survival reflex taking on the world

  as it isnot as we wish it

  as it isnot as we work for it

  to be

  III.

  Strangers are an endangered species

  In Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst

  cocktails are servedthe scholars

  gather in celebration

  their pious or clinical legends

  festoon the walls like imitations

  of period patterns

  (… and, as I feared, my “life” was made a “victim”)

  The remnants pawedthe relics

  the cult assembled in the bedroom

  and youwhose teeth were set on edge by churches

  resist your shine

  escape

  are found

  nowhere

  unless in words

  (your own)

  All we are strangers—dear—The world is not

  acquainted with us, because we are not acquainted

  with her. And Pilgrims!—Do you hesitate? and

  Soldiers oft—some of us victors, but those I do

  not see tonight owing to the smoke.—We are hungry,

  and thirsty, sometimes—We are barefoot—and cold—

  This place is large enough for both of us

  the river-fog will do for privacy

  this is my third and last address to you

  with the hands of a daughter I would cover you

  from all intrusioneven my own

  sayingrest to your ghost

  with the hands of a sister I would leave your hands

  open or closed as they prefer to lie

  and ask no more of who or why or wherefore

  with the hands of a mother I would close the door

  on the rooms you’ve left behind

  and silently pick up my fallen work

  IV

  The river-fog will do for privacy

  on the low road a breath

  here, there, a cloudiness floating on the blacktop

  sunflower heads turned black and bowed

  the seas of corn a stubble

  the old routes flowing north, if not to fr
eedom

  no human figure now in sight

  (with whom do you believe your lot is cast?)

  only the functional figure of the scarecrow

  the cut corn, ground to shreds, heaped in a shape

  like an Indian burial mound

  a haunted-looking, ordinary thing

  The work of winter starts fermenting in my head

  how with the hands of a lover or a midwife

  to hold back till the time is right

  force nothing, be unforced

  accept no giant miracles of growth

  by counterfeit light

  trust roots, allow the days to shrink

  give credence to these slender means

  wait without sadness and with grave impatience

  here in the north where winter has a meaning

  where the heaped colors suddenly go ashen

  where nothing is promised

  learn what an underground journey

  has been, might have to be; speak in a winter code

  let fog, sleet, translate; wind, carry them.

  V.

  Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

  over the Mohawk Traila parallelogram

  slashed with two cuts of steel

  A night so clear that every constellation

  stands out from an undifferentiated cloud

  of stars, a kind of aura

  All the figures up there look violent to me

  as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country

  I want our own earthnot the satellites, our

  world as it isif not as it might be

  then as it is:male dominion, gangrape, lynching, pogrom

  the Mohawk wraiths in their tracts of leafless birch

  watching:will we do better?

  The tests I need to pass are prescribed by the spirits

  of placewho understand travel but not amnesia

  The world as it is:not as her users boast

  damaged beyond reclamation by their using

  Ourselves as we arein these painful motions