Collected Poems

Home > Fantasy > Collected Poems > Page 50
Collected Poems Page 50

by Adrienne Rich


  1989

  OLIVIA

  Among fundamentalist Christians, she was one of them;

  in our anti-apartheid groups, she was the

  most militant. … She was a chameleon.

  —White South African student activist interviewed on National Public Radio, 10/11/88

  Yes, I saw you, see you, come

  into the meetings, out of the rain

  with your wan cheek and your thin waist—

  did anyone see you eat?

  Did anyone see you eat, did you wear

  a woman’s body, were you air

  to their purpose, liquid at their call

  when you stood, spine against the wall?

  And I know your stance, back to the wall,

  overlooking the others, your bent head

  your sense of timing, your outraged tongue

  the notes you take when you get home.

  I see the white joints of your wrist

  moving across the yellow pad

  the exhausted theatre of your sleep:

  I know the power you thought you had—

  to know them all, better than they

  knew you, than they knew you knew,

  to know better than those who paid

  you—paid by them, to move

  at some pure point of mastery

  as if, in your slight outline, moon

  you could dwell above them, light and shade,

  travel forever to and fro

  above both sides, all sides, none,

  gliding the edges, knapsack crammed

  —was that it? to lift above

  loyalty, love and all that trash

  higher than power and its fields of force?

  —never so much as a woman friend?

  You were a woman walked on a leash.

  And they dropped you in the end.

  1988

  EASTERN WAR TIME

  1

  Memory lifts her smoky mirror:1943,

  single isinglass windowkerosene

  stove in the streetcar barnhalfset moon

  8:15 a.m. Eastern War Time dark

  Number 29 clanging in and turning

  looseleaf notebookLatin for Americans

  Breasted’s History of the Ancient World

  on the girl’s lap

  money for lunch and war-stamps in her pocket

  darkblue wool wet acrid on her hands

  three pools of lightweak ceiling bulbs

  a schoolgirl’s hope-spilt terrified

  sensations wired to smells

  of kerosene wool and snow

  and the sound of the dead language

  praised as keytorchlight of the great dead

  Grey spreadingbehind still-flying snow

  the lean and sway of the streetcar she must ride

  to become oneof a hundred girls

  rising white-cuffed and collared in a study hall

  to sing For those in peril on the sea

  under plaster casts of the classic frescoes

  chariots horses draperies certitudes.

  2

  Girl between home and schoolwhat is that girl

  Swinging her plaid linen bookbagwhat’s an American girl

  in wartimeher permed friz of hair

  her glasses for school and movies

  between school and homeignorantly Jewish

  trying to grasp the world

  through books:Jude the ObscureThe Ballad

  of Reading Gaol Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Story

  NV15CABLE-LIVERPOOL 1221/63NFD

  HEADQUARTERS PLAN DISCUSSED AND UNDER

  CONSIDERATION

  ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CONTROLLED

  GERMANY

  NUMBER 3 1/2 – TO 4 MILLION SHOULD AFTER

  DEPORTATION

  AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST

  AT ONE BLOW EXTERMINATED TO RESOLVE

  ONCE AND FOR ALL JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE

  3

  How telegrams used to come:ring

  of the doorbellserious messenger

  bicycling with his sheafenveloped pasted strips

  yellow on yellowthe stripped messages

  DELAYED STOP MEET 2:27 THURSDAY

  DAUGHTER BORN LAST NIGHT STOP BOTH DOING

  WELL

  THE WAR DEPARTMENT REGRETS TO INFORM YOU

  also: PARENTS DEPORTED UNKNOWN DESTINATION

  EAST

  SITUATION DIFFICULTether of messages

  in capital letterssilence

  4

  What the grown-ups can’t speak ofwould you push

  onto children?and the deadweight of Leo Frank

  thirty years lynchedhangs heavy

  :“this is what our parents were trying to spare us”:

  here in Americabut in terrible Europe

  anything was possiblesurely?

  :“But this is the twentieth century”:

  what the grown-ups can’t teachchildren must learn

  how do you teach a child what you won’t believe?

  how do you sayunfold, my flower, shine, my star

  and we are hated, being what we are?

  5

  A young girl knows she is young and meant to live

  taken on the closed journey

  her pockets drained of meaning

  her ankles greased in vomit and diarrhea

  driven naked across the yard

  a young girl remembers her youth:

  anythingtextbooksforbidden novels

  school songspetnames

  the single time she bled and never since

  having her hair doneits pale friz

  clipped and shapedstill frizpale Jewish hair

  over her green Jewish eyes

  thinking she was pretty and that others would see it

  and not to bleed again and not to die

  in the gasbut on the operating table

  of the famous doctor

  who plays string quartets with his staff in the laboratory

  6

  A girl wanders with a boy into the woods

  a romantic walka couple in a poem

  hand-in-handbut you’re not watching each other

  for signs of desireyou’re watching the woods

  for signs of the secret baseslines

  converging toward the resistancewhere the guns

  are cachedthe precious tools

  the strategies arguedyou’re fourteen, fifteen

  classmates from Vilnawalking away from Vilna

  your best marks were in history and geometryhis

  in chemistryyou don’t intend to die

  too much you think is waiting in youfor you

  you never knew the forest outside Vilna

  could hide so manywould have to

  you’d dreamed of living in the forest

  as in a folksonglying on loose pine-needles

  light ribboning from sky cross-hatched with needles

  you and one dearest friendnow you will meet the others

  7

  A woman of sixtydriving

  the great gradessea-level to high desert

  a century slipping from her shoulders

  a blink in geological time

  though heavy to those who had to wear it

  Knowledge has entered her connective tissue and

  into sand dissolved her cartilage

  If her skeleton is found this will be clear

  or was it knowledgemaybe a dangerous questioning

  At night she lieseyes openseeing

  the young who do not wander in the moonlight

  as in a poemfaces seen

  for thirty yearsunder the fire-hoses

  walking through mobs to school

  dragged singing from the buses

  following the coffins

  and herebrows knotted under knotted scarfs

  dark eyessearching armed streets

  for the end of degradation

  8

  A woman wired in
memories

  stands by a housecollapsed in dust

  her son beaten in prisongrandson

  shot in the stomachdaughter

  organizing the campsan aunt’s unpublished poems

  grandparents’ photographsa bridal veil

  phased into smokeup the obliterate air

  With whom shall she let down and tell her story

  Who shall hear her to the end

  standing if need be for hoursin wind

  that swirls the leveled dust

  in sun that beats through their scarfed hair

  at the lost gate by the shattered prickly pear

  Who must hear her to the end

  but the womanforbidden to forget

  the blunt groats freezing in the wooden ladle

  old windsdusting the ovens with light snow?

  9

  Streets closed, emptied by forceGuns at corners

  with open mouths and eyesMemory speaks:

  You cannot live on me alone

  you cannot live without me

  I’m nothing if I’m just a roll of film

  stills from a vanished world

  fixed lightstreaked mute

  left for another generation’s

  restoration and framingI can’t be restored or framed

  I can’t be stillI’m here

  in your mirrorpressed leg to leg beside you

  intrusive inappropriate bitter flashing

  with what makes me unkillable though killed

  10

  Memory says:Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

  I’m a canal in Europe where bodies are floating

  I’m a mass graveI’m the life that returns

  I’m a table set with room for the Stranger

  I’m a field with corners left for the landless

  I’m accused of child-deathof drinking blood

  I’m a man-child praising God he’s a man

  I’m a woman bargaining for a chicken

  I’m a woman who sells for a boat ticket

  I’m a family dispersed between night and fog

  I’m an immigrant tailor who says A coat

  is not a piece of cloth onlyI sway

  in the learnings of the master-mystics

  I have dreamed of ZionI’ve dreamed of world revolution

  I have dreamed my children could live at last like others

  I have walked the children of others through ranks of hatred

  I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin

  a river in MississippiI’m a woman standing

  with other women dressed in black

  on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem

  there is spit on my sleeve there are phonecalls in the night

  I am a woman standing in line for gasmasks

  I stand on a road in Ramallahwith naked facelistening

  I am standing here in your poemunsatisfied

  lifting my smoky mirror

  1989–1990

  TATTERED KADDISH

  Taurean reaper of the wild apple field

  messenger from earthmire gleaning

  transcripts of fog

  in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month

  speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:

  Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel

  on ones we knew and loved

  Praise to life though its windows blew shut

  on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved

  Praise to life though ones we knew and loved

  loved it badly, too well, and not enough

  Praise to life though it tightened like a knot

  on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

  Praise to life giving room and reason

  to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

  Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

  1989

  THROUGH CORRALITOS UNDER ROLLS OF CLOUD

  I

  Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud

  between winter-stiff, ranged apple-trees

  each netted in transparent air,

  thin sinking light, heartsick within and filmed

  in heartsickness around you, gelatin cocoon

  invisible yet impervious—to the hawk

  steering against the cloudbank, to the clear

  oranges burning at the rancher’s gate

  rosetree, agave, stiff beauties holding fast

  with or without your passion,

  the pruners freeing up the boughs

  in the unsearched faith these strange stiff shapes will bear.

  II

  Showering after ’flu;stripping the bed;

  running the shrouds of sickness through the wash;

  airing the rooms;emptying the trash;

  it’s as if part of you had died in the house

  sometime in that last low-lit afternoon

  when your dreams ebbed salt-thick into the sheets

  and now this other’s left to wash the corpse,

  burn eucalyptus, turn the mirrors over—

  this is other who herself barely came back,

  whose breath was fog to your mist, whose stubborn shadow

  covered you as you lay freezing, she survived

  uncertain who she is or will be without you.

  III

  If you know who died in that bed, do you know

  who has survivedIf you say, she was weaker,

  held life less dear, expected others

  to fight for herif pride lets you name her

  victimand the one who got up and threw

  the windows open, stripped the bed, survivor

  —what have you said, what do you know

  of the survivor when you know her

  only in opposition to the lost?

  What does it mean to say I have survived

  until you take the mirrors and turn them outward

  and read your own face in their outraged light?

  IV

  That light of outrage is the light of history

  springing upon us when we’re least prepared,

  thinking maybe a little glade of time

  leaf-thick and with clear water

  is ours, is promised us, for all we’ve hacked

  and tracked our way through:to this:

  What will it be?Your wish or mine?your

  prayers or my wish then:that those we love

  be well, whatever that means, to be well.

  Outrage:who dare claim protection for their own

  amid such unprotection?What kind of prayer

  is that?To what kind of god?What kind of wish?

  V

  She who died on that bed sees it her way:

  She who went under peers through the translucent shell

  cupping her death and sees her other well,

  through a long lens, in silvered outline, well

  she sees her other and she cannot tell

  why when the boom of surf struck at them both

  she felt the undertow and heard the bell,

  thought death would be their twinning, till the swell

  smashed her against the reef, her other still

  fighting the pull, struggling somewhere away

  further and further, calling her all the while:

  she who went under summons her other still.

  1989–1990

  FOR A FRIEND IN TRAVAIL

  Waking from violence:the surgeon’s probe left in the foot

  paralyzing the body from the waist down.

  Dark before dawn:wrapped in a shawl, to walk the house

  the Drinking-Gourd slung in the northwest,

  half-slice of moon to the south

  through dark panes.A time to speak to you.

  What are you going through? she said, is the great question.

  Philosopher of oppression, theorist

  of the victories of force.

  We write from the marrow of our
bones.What she did not

  ask, or tell:how victims save their own lives.

  That crawl along the ledge, then the raveling span of fibre

  strung

  from one side to the other, I’ve dreamed that too.

  Waking, not sure we made it.Relief, appallment, of waking.

  Consciousness.O, no.To sleep again.

  O to sleep without dreaming.

  How day breaks, when it breaks, how clear and light the moon

  melting into moon-colored air

  moist and sweet, here on the western edge.

  Love for the world, and we are part of it.

  How the poppies break from their sealed envelopes

  she did not tell.

  What are you going through, there on the other edge?

  1990

  1948: JEWS

  A mother’s letter, torn open

  in a college mailroom:

  … Some of them will be

  the most brilliant, fascinating

  you’ll ever meet

  but don’t get taken up by any clique

  trying to claim you

  —Marry out, like your father

  she didn’t writeShe wrote forwrote

  againsthim

  It was a burden for anyone

  to be fascinating, brilliant

  after the six million

  Never mind just coming home

  and trying to get some sleep

  like an ordinary person

  1990

  TWO ARTS

  1

  I’ve redone you by daylight.

  Squatted before your gauntness

  chipping away.Slivers of rock

  piling up like petals.

  All night I’d worked to illuminate the skull.

  By dawn you were pure electric.You pulsed like a star.

 

‹ Prev