Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  they feel like eternal forms:the house and barn

  on the rise above May Pond; the brow of Pisgah;

  the face of milkweed blooming,

  brookwater pleating over slanted granite,

  boletus under pine, the half-composted needles

  it broke through patterned on its skin.

  Shape of queen anne’s lace, with the drop of blood.

  Bladder-campion veined with purple.

  Multifoliate heal-all.

  II

  I refuse to become a seeker for cures.

  Everything that has ever

  helped me has come through what already

  lay stored in me.Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong

  across my heart.

  This is from where

  my strength comes, even when I miss my strength

  even when it turns on me

  like a violent master.

  III

  From where?the voice asks coldly.

  This is the voice in cold morning air

  that pierces dreams.From where does your strength come?

  Old things …

  From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew?

  split at the root, raised in a castle of air?

  Yes.I expected this.I have known for years

  the question was coming.From where

  (not from these, surely,

  Protestant separatists, Jew-baiters, nightriders

  who fired in Irasburg in nineteen-sixty-eight

  on a black family newly settled in these hills)

  From where

  the dew grows thick late August on the fierce green grass

  and on the wooden sill and on the stone

  the mountains stand in an extraordinary

  point of no returnthough still are green

  collapsed shed-boards gleam like pewter in the dew

  the realms of touch-me-notfiery with tiny tongues

  cover the wild ground of the woods

  IV

  With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

  From where does your strength come?

  I think somehow, somewhere

  every poem of mine must repeat those questions

  which are not the same.There is a whom, a where

  that is not chosenthat is givenand sometimes falsely given

  in the beginning we grasp whatever we can

  to survive

  V

  All during World War II

  I told myself I had some special destiny:

  there had to be a reason

  I was not living in a bombed-out house

  or cellarhiding out with rats

  there had to be a reason

  I was growing up safe, American

  with sugar rationed in a Mason jar

  split at the rootwhite-skinned social Christian

  neither gentile nor Jew

  through the immense silence

  of the Holocaust

  I had no idea of what I had been spared

  still less of the women and menmy kin

  the Jews of Vicksburg or Birmingham

  whose lives must have been strategies no less

  than the vixen’s on Route 5

  VI

  If they had played the flute, or chess

  I was toldI was not told what they told

  their children when the Klan rode

  how they might have seen themselves

  a chosen people

  of shopkeepers

  clinging by strategy to a way of life

  that had its own uses for them

  proud of their length of sojourn in America

  deploring the late-comersthe peasants from Russia

  I saw my father building

  his rootless ideology

  his private castle in air

  in that most dangerous place, the family home

  we were the chosen people

  In the beginning we grasp whatever we can

  VII

  For years I struggled with you:your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty which came inextricable from your love.For years all arguments I carried on in my head were with you.I saw myself, the eldest daughter raised as a son, taught to study but not to pray, taught to hold reading and writing sacred: the eldest daughter in a house with no son, she who must overthrow the father, take what he taught her and use it against him.All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.

  After your death I met you again as the face of patriarchy, could name at last precisely the principle you embodied, there was an ideology at last which let me dispose of you, identify the suffering you caused, hate you righteously as part of a system, the kingdom of the fathers.I saw the power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me.It is only now, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and deny no part of my own.

  VIII

  Back there in Maryland the stars

  showed liquescent, diffuse

  in the breathless summer nights

  the constellation melted

  I thought I was leaving a place of enervation

  heading north where the Drinking Gourd

  stood cold and steady at last

  pointing the way

  I thought I was following a track of freedom

  and for awhile it was

  IX

  Why has my imagination stayed

  northeast with the ones who stayed

  Are there spirits in me, diaspora-driven

  that wanted to lodge somewhere

  hooked into the “New” Englanders who hung on

  here in this stringent space

  believing their Biblical language

  their harping on righteousness?

  And, myself apart, what was this like for them,

  this unlikely growing season

  after each winter so mean, so mean

  the trying-down of the spirit

  and the endless rocks in the soil, the endless

  purifications of self

  there being no distance, no space around

  to experiment with life?

  X

  These upland farms are the farms

  of invaders, these villages

  white with rectitude and death

  are built on stolen ground

  The persecuted, pale with anger

  know how to persecute

  those who feel destined, under god’s eye

  need never ponder difference

  and if they kill others for being who they are

  or where they are

  is this a law of history

  or simply, what must change?

  XI

  If I try to conjure their lives

  —who are not my people by any definition—

  Yankee Puritans, Québec Catholics

  mingled within sight of the Northern Lights

  I am forced to conjure a passion

  like the tropism in certain plants

  bred of a natural region’s

  repetitive events

  beyond the numb of poverty

  christian hypocrisy, isolation

  —a passion so unexpected

  there is no name for it

  so quick, fierce, unconditional

  short growing season is no explanation.

  XII

  And has any of this to do with how

  Mohawk or Wampanoag knew it?.

  is the passion I connect with in this air

  trace of the original

  existences that knew this place

  is the region still trying to speak with them

  is this light a language

  the shudder of this aspen-grove a way

  of sending messages

  the white mind ba
rely intercepts

  are signals also coming back

  from the vast diaspora

  of the people who kept their promises

  as a way of life?

  XIII

  Coming back after sixteen years

  I stare anew at things

  that steeple pure and righteous

  that clapboard farmhouse

  seeing what I hadn’t seen before

  through barnboards, crumbling plaster

  decades of old wallpaper roses

  clinging to certain studs

  —into that dangerous place

  the family home:

  There are verbal brutalities

  borne thereafter like any burn or scar

  there are words pulled down from the walls

  like dogwhips

  the child backed silent against the wall

  trying to keep her eyes dry;haughty;in panic

  I will never let you know

  I will never

  let you know

  XIV

  And if my look becomes the bomb that rips

  the family home apart

  is this betrayal, that the walls

  slice off, the staircase shows

  torn-away above the street

  that the closets where the clothes hung

  hang naked, the room the old

  grandmother had to sleep in

  the toilet on the landing

  the room with the books

  where the father walks up and down

  telling the child to work, work

  harder than anyone has worked before?

  —But I can’t stop seeing like this

  more and more I see like this everywhere.

  XV

  It’s an oldfashioned, an outrageous thing

  to believe one has a “destiny”

  —a thought often peculiar to those

  who possess privilege—

  but there is something else:the faith

  of those despised and endangered

  that they are not merely the sum

  of damages done to them:

  have kept beyond violence the knowledge

  arranged in patterns like kente-cloth

  unexpected as in batik

  recurrent as bitter herbs and unleavened bread

  of being a connective link

  in a long, continuous way

  of ordering hunger, weather, death, desire

  and the nearness of chaos.

  XVI

  The Jews I’ve felt rooted among

  are those who were turned to smoke

  Reading of the chimneys against the blear air

  I think I have seen them myself

  the fog of northern Europe licking its way

  along the railroad tracks

  to the place where all tracks end

  You told me not to look there

  to become

  a citizen of the world

  bound by no tribe or clan

  yet dying you followed the Six Day War

  with desperate attention

  and this summer I lie awake at dawn

  sweating the Middle East through my brain

  wearing the star of David

  on a thin chain at my breastbone

  XVII

  But there was also the other Jew. The one you most feared, the one from the shtetl, from Brooklyn, from the wrong part of history, the wrong accent, the wrong class. The one I left you for.The one both like and unlike you, who explained you to me for years, who could not explain himself.The one who said, as if he had memorized the formula, There’s nothing left now but the food and the humor.The one who, like you, ended isolate, who had tried to move in the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.Who drove to Vermont in a rented car at dawn and shot himself.For so many years I had thought you and he were in opposition. I needed your unlikeness then; now it’s your likeness that stares me in the face.There is something more than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands:there is something more.

  XVIII

  There is something more than self-hatred. That still outlives

  these photos of the old Ashkenazi life:

  we are gifted children at camp in the country

  or orphaned children in kindergarten

  we are hurrying along the rare book dealers’ street

  with the sunlight striking one side

  we are walking the wards of the Jewish hospital

  along diagonal squaresyoung serious nurses

  we are part of a family group

  formally taken in 1936

  with tables, armchairs, ferns

  (behind us, in our lives, the muddy street

  and the ragged shames

  the street-musician, the weavers lined for strike)

  we are part of a family wearing white head-bandages

  we were beaten in a pogrom

  The place where all tracks end

  is the place where history was meant to stop

  but does not stopwhere thinking

  was meant to stop but does not stop

  where the pattern was meant to give way at last

  but only

  becomes a different pattern

  terrible, threadbare

  strainedfamiliaron-going

  XIX

  They say such things are stored

  in the genetic code—

  half-chances, unresolved

  possibilities, the life

  passed on because unlived—

  a mystic biology?—

  I think of the women who sailed to Palestine

  years before I was born—

  halutzot, pioneers

  believing in a new life

  socialists, anarchists, jeered

  as excitable, sharp of tongue

  too filled with life

  wanting equality in the promised land

  carrying the broken promises

  of Zionism in their hearts

  along with the broken promises

  of communism, anarchism—

  makers of miracle who expected miracles

  as stubbornly as any housewife does

  that the life she gives her life to

  shall not be cheap

  that the life she gives her life to

  shall not turn on her

  that the life she gives her life to

  shall want an end to suffering

  Zion by itself is not enough.

  XX

  The faithful drudging child

  the child at the oak desk whose penmanship,

  hard work, style will win her prizes

  becomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes

  but to change the laws of history.

  How she gets this mission

  is not clear, how the boundaries of perfection

  explode, leaving her cheekbone grey with smoke

  a piece of her hair singed off, her shirt

  spattered with earth … Say that she grew up in a house

  with talk of books, ideal societies—

  she is gripped by a blue, a foreign air,

  a desert absolute:dragged by the roots of her own will

  into another scene of choices.

  XXI

  YERUSHALAYIM:a vault of golden heat

  hard-pulsing from bare stones

  the desert’s hard-won, delicate green

  the diaspora of the stars

  thrilling like thousand-year-old locusts

  audible yet unheard

  a city on a hill

  waking with first light to voices

  piercing, original, intimate

  as if my dreams mixed with the cries

  of the oldest, earliest birds

  and of all whose wrongs and rights

  cry out for explication

  as the night pales and one more day

  breaks on this Zion of hope and fear

  an
d broken promises

  this promised land

  XXII

  I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me.It’s been different with my father:he and I always had a kind of rhetoric going with each other, a battle between us, it didn’t matter if one of us was alive or dead.But, you, I’ve had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings; letting you dwell in the minds of those who have reason to miss you, in your way, or their way, not mine. The living, writers especially, are terrible projectionists.I hate the way they use the dead.

  Yet I can’t finish this without speaking to you, not simply of you.You knew there was more left than food and humor.Even as you said that in 1953 I knew it was a formula you had found, to stand between you and pain.The deep crevices of black pumpernickel under the knife, the sweet butter and red onions we ate on those slices; the lox and cream cheese on fresh onion rolls; bowls of sour cream mixed with cut radishes, cucumber, scallions; green tomatoes and kosher dill pickles in half-translucent paper; these, you said, were the remnants of the culture, along with the fresh challah which turned stale so fast but looked so beautiful.