Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  Home caved, shuddered, yet held

  without Absence’s consent. Home took a walk

  in several parks, Home shivered

  in outlying boroughs, slept on strange floors,

  cried many riffs of music, many words.

  Home went out to teach school, Home studied pain control

  Home learned to dive and came up blind with blood

  Home learned to live on each location

  but whenever Absence called, called, Home had to answer

  in the grammar of Absence.

  Home would hitch-hike

  through flying snow, Home would roast meat,

  light candles, to withstand the cold. Home washed the dishes

  faithfully. But Absence

  always knew when to call.

  What if Absence calls

  and a voice answers

  in the accent of Home?

  1986

  IN MEMORIAM: D.K.

  A man walking on the street

  feels unwellhas felt unwell

  all week, a littleYet the flowers crammed

  in pots on the corner:furled anemones:

  he knows they open

  burgundy, violet, pink, Amarillo

  all the way to their velvet cores

  The flowers hanging over the fence:fuchsias:

  each tongued, staring,all of a fire:

  the flowersHe who has

  been happy oftener than sad

  carelessly happywell oftener than sick

  one of the luckyis thinking about death

  and its musicabout poetry

  its translations of his life

  And what good will it do you

  to go home and put on the Mozart Requiem?

  Read Keats?How will culture cure you?

  Poor, unhappy

  unwell culturewhat can it sing or say

  six weeks from now, to you?

  Give me your living handIf I could take the hour

  death moved into youundeclared, unnamed

  —even if sweet, if I could take that hour

  between my forcepstear at it like a monster

  wrench it out of your fleshdissolve its shape in quicklime

  and make you well again

  no, not again

  but still. …

  1986

  CHILDREN PLAYING CHECKERS

  AT THE EDGE OF THE FOREST

  Two green-webbed chairs

  a three-legged stool between

  Your tripod

  Spears of grass

  longer than your bare legs

  cast shadows on your legs

  drawn up

  from the red-and-black

  cardboard squares

  the board of play

  the board of rules

  But you’re not playing, you’re talking

  It’s midsummer

  and greater rules are breaking

  It’s the last

  innocent summer you will know

  and I

  will go on awhile pretending that’s not true

  When I have done pretending

  I can see this:

  the depth of the background

  shadows

  not of one moment only

  erased and charcoaled in again

  year after year

  how the tree looms back behind you

  the first tree of the forest

  the last tree

  from which the deer step out

  from protection

  the first tree

  into dreadfulness

  The last and the first tree

  1987

  SLEEPWALKINGNEXT TO DEATH

  Sleephorns of a snail

  protruding, retracting

  What we choose to know

  or not know

  all these years

  sleepwalking

  next to death

  I

  This snail could have been eaten

  This snail could have been crushed

  This snail could have dreamed it was a painter or a poet

  This snail could have driven fast at night

  putting up graffiti with a spray-gun:

  This snail could have ridden

  in the back of the pick-up, handing guns

  II

  Knows, chooses not to know

  It has always

  been about death and chances

  The Dutch artist wrote and painted

  one or more strange and usable things

  For I mean to meet you

  in any landin any language

  This is my promise:

  I will be there

  if you are there

  III

  In between this and that there are different places

  of waiting, airports mostly where the air

  is hungover, visibility lowboarding passes not guaranteed

  If you wrote me, I sat next to Naomi

  I would read that, someone who felt like Ruth

  I would begin reading you like a dream

  That’s how extreme it feels

  that’s what I have to do

  IV

  Every stone around your neck you know the reason for

  at this time in your lifeRelentlessly

  you tell me their names and furiously I

  forget their namesForgetting the names of the stones

  you love, you lover of stones

  what is it I do?

  V

  What is it I do? I refuse to take your place

  in the worldI refuse to make myself

  your courierI refuse so much

  I might ask, what is it I do?

  I will not be the dreamer for whom

  you are the only dream

  I will not be your channel

  I will wrestle you to the end

  for our difference (as you have wrestled me)

  I will change your name and confuse

  the Angel

  VI

  I am stupid with you and practical with you

  I remind you to take a poulticeforget a quarrel

  I am a snail in the back of the pick-up handing you

  vitamins you hate to take

  VII

  Calmly you look over my shoulderat this pageand say

  It’s all about youNone of this

  tells my story

  VIII

  Yesterday noon I stood by a river

  and many waited to cross over

  from the Juarez barrio

  to El Paso del Norte

  First day of springa stand of trees

  in Mexico were in palegreen leaf

  a man casting a net

  into the Rio Grande

  and women, in pairs, strolling

  across the border

  as if taking a simple walk

  Many thousands go

  I stood by the river and thought of you

  youngin Mexicoin a time of hope

  IX

  The practical nurse is the only nurse

  with her plastic valise of poultices and salves

  her hands of glove leather and ebony

  her ledgers of pain

  The practical nurse goes down to the river

  in her runover shoes and her dollar necklace

  eating a burrito in hand

  it will be a long day

  a long labor

  the midwife will be glad to see her

  it will be a long nightsomeone bleeding

  from a botched abortiona beatingWill you let her touch you

  now?

  Will you tell her you’re fine?

  X

  I’m afraid of the border patrol

  Not those men

  of La Migra who could have run us

  into the irrigation canal with their van

  I’m afraid

  of the patrollers

  the sleepwalker in me

  the loner in you

  XI
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  I want five hours with you

  in a train running south

  maybe ten hours

  in a Greyhound bound for the border

  the two seats side-by-side that become a home

  an island of light in the continental dark

  the time that takes the place of a lifetime

  I promise I won’t fall asleep when the lights go down

  I will not be lulled

  Promise you won’t jump the train

  vanish into the bus depot at three a.m.

  that you won’t defect

  that we’ll travel

  like two snails

  our four horns erect

  1987

  LETTERS IN THE FAMILY

  I: Catalonia 1936

  Dear Parents:

  I’m the daughter

  you didn’t bless when she left,

  an unmarried woman wearing a khaki knapsack

  with a poor mark in Spanish.

  I’m writing now

  from a plaster-dusted desk in a town

  pocked street by street with hand grenades,

  some of them, dear ones, thrown by me.

  This is a school: the children are at war.

  You don’t need honors in schoolroom Spanish here

  to be of use and my right arm

  ’s as strong as anyone’s. I sometimes think

  all languages are spoken here,

  even mine, which you got zero in.

  Don’t worry. Don’t try to write. I’m happy,

  if you could know it.

  Rochelle.

  II: Yugoslavia, 1944

  Dear Chana,

  where are you now?

  Am sending this pocket-to-pocket

  (though we both know pockets we’d hate to lie in).

  They showed me that poem you gave Reuven,

  about the match:

  Chana, you know, I never was

  for martyrdom. I thought we’d try our best,

  ragtag mission that we were,

  then clear out if the signals looked too bad.

  Something in you drives things ahead for me

  but if I can I mean to stay alive.

  We’re none of us giants, you know,

  just small, frail, inexperienced romantic people.

  But there are things we learn.

  You know the sudden suck of empty space

  between the jump and the ripcord pull?

  I hate it. I hate it so,

  I’ve hated you for your dropping

  ecstatically in free-fall, in the training,

  your look, dragged on the ground, of knowing

  precisely why you were there.

  My mother’s

  still in Palestine. And yours

  still there in Hungary. Well, there we are.

  When this is over—

  I’m

  your earthbound friend to the end, still yours—

  Esther.

  III: Southern Africa, 1986

  Dear children:

  We’ve been walking nights

  a long time over rough terrain,

  sometimes through marshes. Days we hide

  under what bushes we can find.

  Our stars steer us. I write

  on my knee by a river with a weary hand,

  and the weariness will come through

  this letter that should tell you

  nothing but love. I can’t say where we are,

  what weeds are in bloom, what birds cry at dawn.

  The less you know the safer.

  But not to know how you are going on—

  Matile’s earache, Emma’s lessons, those tell-tale

  eyes and tongues, so quick—are you remembering

  to be brave and wise and strong?

  At the end of this hard road

  we’ll sit all together at one meal

  and I’ll tell you everything: the names

  of our comrades, how the letters

  were routed to you, why I left.

  And I’ll stop and say, “Now you,

  grown so big, how was it for you, those times?

  Look, I know you in detail, every inch of each

  sweet body, haven’t I washed and dried you

  a thousand times?”

  And we’ll eat and tell our stories

  together. That is my reason.

  Ma.

  1987

  THE DESERT AS GARDEN OF PARADISE

  1.

  Guard the knowledge

  from the knowledgeable,

  those who gobble:

  make it unpalatable.

  Stars in this place

  might look

  distant to me as you,

  to you as me.

  Monotheism. Where it began.

  But all the spirits, too.

  Desert says: What you believe

  I can prove. I: amaranth flower,

  I: metamorphic rock, I: burrow,

  I: water-drop in tilted catchment,

  I: vulture, I: driest thorn.

  Rocks in a trance. Escaped

  from the arms of other rocks.

  Roads leading to gold and to false gold.

  2.

  I ask you to sing, Chavela, in the desert

  on tapes pirated from smuggled LP’s

  I bring you here with me: I ask you to sing

  It’s not for me, your snarling contralto

  caught on a backdrop of bitter guitar

  not for meyet I pray let me listen

  I don’t pray oftenNever to male or female

  sometimes to music or the flask of sunset

  quick winter eveningsdraining into the ground

  our blood is mixed in, borderland magenta

  and vermilion, never to become one

  yet what we’re singing, dying in, that color

  two-worlded, never oneWhere from bars

  lit by candle and earthquake your music finds me

  whom it didn’t look forThis is why I ask you,

  when the singing escapes the listener and goes

  from the throat to where the mountains hang in chains

  as if they never listenedwhy the song

  wants so much to go where no song has ever gone.

  3.

  In this pale clear light where all mistakes are bathed

  this afterglow of westernness

  I write to you, head wrapped in your darkred scarf

  framed by the sharp spines of the cholla

  you love, the cruel blonde

  spirit of the Mohave blossoming

  in the spring twilights

  of much earlier ages

  Off at this distance I’m safe

  to conjure the danger

  you undergo daily, chin outthrust

  eyelid lowered against the storm

  that takes in an inkling whole ranches down

  with the women the men and the children

  the horses and cattle

  —that much, flash-flood, lightning

  all that had been done right, gone to hell

  all crimes washed down the gulch

  of independence, lost horse trail

  Well, this was your country, Malinche,

  and is, where you choose to speak

  4.

  Every drought-resistant plant has its own story

  each had to learn to live

  with less and less water, each would have loved

  to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip

  after the thunderstorm

  each could do without deprivation

  but where drought is the epic then there must be some

  who persist, not by species-betrayal

  but by changing themselves

  minutely, by a constant study

  of the price of continuity

  a steady bargain with the way things are

  5.

  Then there were those, white-skinned

  r
iding on camels

  fast under scorching skies

  their lives a tome of meaning

  holding all this in fief:

  star-dragged heavens, embroidered saddle-bags

  coffee boiled up in slim urns

  the salt, the oil, the roads

  linking Europe with Asia

  Crusaders, Legionnaires

  desert-rats of empire

  sucking the kid’s bones, drunk with meaning

  fucking the Arab, killing the Jew

  6.

  Deutsches Blut, Ahmad the Arab

  tells Arnold the Jew

  tapping the blue

  veins of his own brown wrist

  in his own walled garden

  spread with figured carpets

  summer, starlight, 1925

  Was it the Crusader line?

  Did they think it made them brothers?

  Arnold the Jew my father

  told me the story, showed me

  his photograph of Ahmad: Deutsches Blut

  7.

  Then there were those, black-robed

  on horseback, tracing the great plateaus

  cut by arroyos, cleft by ravines

  facing Sierra San Pedro San Mártir

  a fixed bar welding Baja California

  to the mainland north:

  a land the most unfortunate

  ungrateful and miserable of this world

  Padre Miguel Venegas wrote

  yet they ordered the missions raised

  from fragile ramadas

  the thin stream drawn from the watering-hole

  into gardens of fig, palm, sugarcane

  tried to will what cannot be willed

  killed many in the trying:

  unpacked smallpox, measles, typhus

  from the chests with the linens and chalices

  packed the sufferers in plague-ridden rooms

  baptized in one village walk

  all the children, who then died.

  (San Ignacio!Soledad!)

  There were those: convinced the material

  was base, the humanity less

  —Out of what can I bring forth a Christian soul?

  For these, naked and dark

  I come to do the work of Cross and Crown?