Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 48

by Adrienne Rich


  once, you’d still know me now though in a different

  light and life.This is no place you ever knew me.

  But it would not surprise you

  to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean

  eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always

  I fix on the land.I am stuck to earth.What I love here

  is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks

  small canyons running through pitched hillsides

  liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading

  to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle

  on their blond hills.I drive inland over roads

  closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons

  roads that crawl down into darkness and wind into light

  where trucks have crashed and riders of horses tangled

  to death with lowstruck boughs.These are not the roads

  you knew me by.But the woman driving, walking, watching

  for life and death, is the same.

  II

  Here is a map of our country:

  here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt

  This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin

  we dare not taste its water

  This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms

  This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms

  This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy

  This is the cemetery of the poor

  who died for democracyThis is a battlefield

  from a nineteenth-century warthe shrine is famous

  This is the sea-town of myth and storywhen the fishing fleets

  went bankrupthere is where the jobs wereon the pier

  processing frozen fishstickshourly wages and no shares

  These are other battlefieldsCentraliaDetroit

  here are the forests primevalthe copperthe silver lodes

  These are the suburbs of acquiescencesilence rising fumelike

  from the streets

  This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires

  flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling

  whose children are drifting blind alleys pent

  between coiled rolls of razor wire

  I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural

  then yes let it bethese are small distinctions

  where do we see it from is the question

  III

  Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, bought at the

  Ben Franklin, Barton, twenty-three years ago, one

  chipped

  —now they hold half-burnt darkred candles, and in between

  a spider is working, the third point of her filamental passage

  a wicker basket-handle.All afternoon I’ve sat

  at this table in Vermont, reading, writing, cutting an apple in

  slivers

  and eating them, but mostly gazing down through the windows

  at the long scribble of lake due south

  where the wind and weather come from.There are bottles set in

  the windows

  that children dug up in summer woods or bought for nickels and

  dimes

  in dark shops that are no more, gold-brown, foam-green or cobalt

  glass, blue that gave way to the cobalt

  bomb.The woods

  are still on the hill behind the difficult unknowable

  incommensurable barn.The wind’s been working itself up

  in low gusts gnashing the leaves left chattering on branches

  or drifting over still-green grass;but it’s been a warm wind.

  An autumn without a killing frost so far, still warm

  feels like a time of self-deception, a memory of pushing

  limits in youth, that intricate losing game of innocence long

  overdue

  Frost is expected tonight, gardens are gleaned, potplants taken in,

  there is talk of withering, of wintering-over.

  •

  North of Willoughby the back road to Barton

  turns a right-hand corner on a high plateau

  bitten by wind now and rimed grey-white

  —farms of rust and stripping paint, the shortest growing season

  south of Quebec, a place of sheer unpretentious hardship, dark

  pines stretching away

  toward Canada.There was a one-room schoolhouse

  by a brook where we used to picnic, summers, a little world

  of clear bubbling water, cowturds, moss, wild mint, wild mush-

  rooms under the pines.

  One hot afternoon I sat there reading Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte

  Brontë—the remote

  upland village where snow lay long and late, the deep-rutted

  roads, the dun and grey moorland

  —trying to enfigure such a life, how genius

  unfurled in the shortlit days, the meagre means of that house. I

  never thought

  of lives at that moment around me, what girl dreamed

  and was extinguished in the remote back-country I had come to

  love,

  reader reading under a summer tree in the landscape

  of the rural working poor.

  Now the panes are black and from the south the wind still stag-

  gers, creaking the house:

  brown milkweeds toss in darkness below but I cannot see them

  the room has lost the window and turned into itself: two corner

  shelves of things

  both useful and unused, things arrived here by chance or choice,

  two teapots, one broken-spouted, red and blue

  came to me with some books from my mother’s mother, my

  grandmother Mary

  who travelled little, loved the far and strange, bits of India, Asia

  and this teapot of hers was Chinese or she thought it was

  —the other given by a German Jew, a refugee who killed herself

  Midlands flowered ware, and this too cannot be used because

  coated inside—why?—with flaking paint:

  “You will always use it for flowers,” she instructed when she

  gave it.

  In a small frame, under glass, my father’s bookplate, engraved in

  his ardent youth, the cleft tree-trunk and the win-

  tering ants:

  Without labor, no sweetness—motto I breathed in from him and

  learned in grief and rebellion to take and use

  —and later learned that not all labor ends in sweetness.

  A little handwrought iron candlestick, given by another German

  woman

  who hidden survived the Russian soldiers beating the walls in

  1945,

  emigrated, married a poet.I sat many times at their table.

  They are now long apart.

  Some odd glasses for wine or brandy, from an ignorant, passion-

  ate time—we were in our twenties—

  with the father of the children who dug for old medicine bottles

  in the woods

  —afternoons listening to records, reading Karl Shapiro’s Poems

  of a Jew and Auden’s “In Sickness and in Health”

  aloud, using the poems to talk to each other

  —now it’s twenty years since last I heard that intake

  of living breath, as if language were too much to bear,

  that voice overcast like klezmer with echoes, uneven, edged,

  torn, Brooklyn street crowding Harvard Yard

  —I’d have known any syllable anywhere.

  Stepped out onto the night-porch.That wind has changed,

  though still from the south

  it’s blowing up hard now, no longer close to earth but driving

  high

  into the crowns of the maples,
into my face

  almost slamming the stormdoor into me.But it’s warm, warm,

  pneumonia wind, death of innocence wind, unwinding wind,

  time-hurtling wind.And it has a voice in the house.I hear

  conversations that can’t be happening, overhead in the bedrooms

  and I’m not talking of ghosts.The ghosts are here of course but

  they speak plainly

  —haven’t I offered food and wine, listened well for them all

  these years,

  not only those known in life but those before our time

  of self-deception, our intricate losing game of innocence long

  overdue?

  •

  The spider’s decision is made, her path cast, candle-wick to

  wicker handle to candle,

  in the air, under the lamp, she comes swimming toward me

  (have I been sitting here so long?)she will use everything,

  nothing comes without labor, she is working so

  hard and I know

  nothing all winter can enter this house or this web, not all labor

  ends in sweetness.

  But how do I know what she needs?Maybe simply

  to spin herself a house within a house, on her own terms

  in cold, in silence.

  IV

  Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds

  the map of this country together: the girasol, orange gold-

  petalled

  with her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to

  California

  runs the edges of orchards, chain-link fences

  milo fields and malls, schoolyards and reservations

  truckstops and quarries, grazing ranges, graveyards

  of veterans, graveyards of cars hulked and sunk, her tubers the

  jerusalem artichoke

  that has fed the Indians, fed the hobos, could feed us all.

  Is there anything in the soil, cross-country, that makes for

  a plant so generous?Spendtbrift we say, as if

  accounting nature’s waste.Ours darkens

  the states to their strict borders, flushes

  down borderless streams, leaches from lakes to the curdled foam

  down by the riverside.

  Waste.Waste.The watcher’s eye put out, hands of the

  builder severed, brain of the maker starved

  those who could bind, join, reweave, cohere, replenish

  now at risk in this segregate republic

  locked away out of sight and hearing, out of mind, shunted aside

  those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments

  those urgently needed for the work of perception

  work of the poet, the astronomer, the historian, the architect of

  new streets

  work of the speaker who also listens

  meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate

  woman, the desperate man

  —never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair—it cannot

  be done without them

  and where are they now?

  V

  Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

  where any calendar’s ripped-off: Appomattox

  Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon

  the ex-Army nurse hitch-hiking from the debriefing center; medal

  of spit on the veteran’s shoulder

  —catch if you can this unbound land these states without a cause

  earth of despoiled graves and grazing these embittered brooks

  these pilgrim ants pouring out from the bronze eyes, ears,

  nostrils,

  the mouth of Liberty

  over the chained bay waters

  San Quentin:

  once we lost our way and drove in under the searchlights to the

  gates

  end of visiting hours, women piling into cars

  the bleak glare aching over all

  Where are we moored?What

  are the bindings?What be-

  hooves us?

  Driving the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge

  no monument’s in sight but fog

  prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz

  poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog

  no icon lifts a lamp here

  history’s breath blotting the air

  over Gold Mountaina transfer

  of patterns like the transfer of African appliqué

  to rural Alabamavoices alive in legends, curses

  tongue-lashings

  poems on a weary wall

  And when light swivels off Angel Island and Alcatraz

  when the bays leap into life

  views of the Palace of Fine Arts,

  TransAmerica

  when sunset bathes the three bridges

  still

  old ghosts crouch hoarsely whispering

  under Gold Mountain

  •

  North and east of the romantic headlands there are roads into tule

  fog

  places where life is cheap poor quick unmonumented

  Rukeyser would have guessed it coming West for the opening

  of the great red bridgeThere are roads to take she wrote

  when you think of your countrydriving south

  to West Virginia Gauley Bridge silicon mines the flakes of it

  heaped like snow, death-angel white

  —poetjournalistpioneermother

  uncovering her country:there are roads to take

  •

  I don’t want to know how he tracked them

  along the Appalachian Trail, hid close

  by their tent, pitched as they thought in seclusion

  killing one woman, the other

  dragging herself into townhis defense they had teased his

  loathing

  of what they wereI don’t want to know

  but this is not a bad dream of minethese are the materials

  and so are the smell of wild mint and coursing water remembered

  and the sweet salt darkred tissue I lay my face

  upon, my tongue within.

  A crosshair against the pupil of an eye

  could blow my life from hers

  a cell dividing without maps, sliver of ice beneath a wheel

  could do the job.Faithfulness isn’t the problem.

  VI

  A potato explodes in the oven.Poetry and famine:

  the poets who never starved, whose names we know

  the famished nameless taking ship with their hoard of poetry

  Annie Sullivan half-blind in the workhouse enthralling her child-

  mates

  with lore her father had borne in his head from Limerick along

  with the dream of work

  and hatred of England smouldering like a turf-fire. But a poetry older

  than hatred. Poetry

  in the workhouse, laying of the rails, a potato splattering oven

  walls

  poetry of cursing and silence, bitter and deep, shallow and

  drunken

  poetry of priest-talk, of I.R.A.-talk, kitchen-talk, dream-talk,

  tongues despised

  in cities where in a mere fifty years language has rotted to jargon,

  lingua franca of inclusion

  from turns of speech ancient as the potato, muttered at the coals

  by women and men

  rack-rented, harshened, numbed by labor ending

  in root-harvest rotted in field. 1847. No relief. No succour.

  America. Meat three times a day, they said.Slaves—You would

  not be that.

  VII (The Dream-Site)

  Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled

  and others known and unknown there, long sweet summer

  evening on the tarred roof:

  leaned back your head to the nigh
tvault swarming with stars

  the Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousands

  every known constellation flinging out fiery threads

  and you could distinguish all

  —cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of stars

  coherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between

  —you knew your way among them, knew you were part of them

  until, neck aching, you sat straight up and saw:

  It was New York, the dream-site

  the lost city the city of dreadful light

  where once as the sacks of garbage rose

  like barricades around us we

  stood listening to riffs from Pharaoh Sanders’ window

  on the brownstone steps

  went striding the avenues in our fiery hair

  in our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways reading

  or pressed against other bodies

  feeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan

  The Bronx unscrolling in the long breakneck

  express plunges

  as darkly we felt our own blood

  streaminga living city overhead

  coherently webbed and knottedbristling

  we and all the others

  known and unknown

  living its life

  VIII

  He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him.

  He depended on that:

  the cuts would be made by someone else, the direction

  come from somewhere else, arrows flashing on the freeway.

  That he’d end somewhere gazing

  straight into It was what he imagined and nothing beyond.

  That he’d end facing as limit a thing without limits and so he

  flung

  and burned and hacked and bled himself toward that (if I

  understand

  this story at all). What he found: FOR SALE: DO NOT

  DISTURB

  OCCUPANT on some cliffs;some ill-marked, ill-kept roads

  ending in warnings about shellfish in Vietnamese, Spanish and

  English.

  But the spray was any color he could have dreamed

  —gold, ash, azure, smoke, moonstone—

  and from time to time the ocean swirled up through the eye of a

  rock and taught him

  limits.Throwing itself backward, singing and sucking, no

  teacher, only its violent

  self, the Pacific, dialectical waters rearing

  their wild calm constructs, momentary, ancient.

 

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