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Collected Poems

Page 51

by Adrienne Rich


  You awoke in the last darkness

  before the light poured in.

  I’ve redone you by daylight.

  Now I can submit you to the arts administrator

  and the council of patrons

  who could never take your measure.

  This time they will love you,

  standing on the glass table, fluent and robed at last,

  and all your origins countered.

  I wrap you in pure white sheets to mail you,

  I brush you off my apron,

  the charged filings crunch like cinders on the floor.

  2

  Raise it up there and it will

  loom, the gaunt original thing

  gristle and membrane of your life

  mortared with shells of trilobites

  it will hold between the cracks

  of lightning, in the deadpan face of before and after

  it will stick on up there as you left it

  pieced together by starlight

  it will hang by the flying buttresses you gave it

  —hulk of mist, rafter of air, suspension bridge of mica

  helm of sweat and dew—

  but you have to raise it up there, you

  have a brutal thing to do.

  1990

  DARKLIGHT

  I

  Early day.Grey the air.

  Grey the boards of the house, the bench,

  red the dilated potflower’s petals

  blue the sky that will rend through

  this fog.

  Dark summer’s outer reaches:

  thrown husk of a moon

  sharpening

  in the last dark blue.

  I think of your eye

  (dark the light

  that washes into a deeper dark).

  An eye, coming in closer.

  Under the lens

  lashes and veins grow huge

  and huge the tear that washes out the eye,

  the tear that clears the eye.

  II

  When heat leaves the walls at last

  and the breeze comes

  or seems to come, off water

  or off the half-finished moon

  her silver roughened by a darkblue rag

  this is the ancient hour

  between light and dark, work and rest

  earthly tracks and star-trails

  the last willed act of the day

  and the night’s first dream

  If you could have this hour

  for the last hour of your life.

  1988–1990

  FINAL NOTATIONS

  it will not be simple, it will not be long

  it will take little time, it will take all your thought

  it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath

  it will be short, it will not be simple

  it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart

  it will not be long, it will occupy your thought

  as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied

  it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

  You are coming into us who cannot withstand you

  you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you

  you are taking parts of us into places never planned

  you are going far away with pieces of our lives

  it will be short, it will take all your breath

  it will not be simple, it will become your will

  1991

  DARK FIELDS OF

  THE REPUBLIC

  (1991–1995)

  He had come a long way to this blue lawn,

  and his dream must have seemed so close that

  he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not

  know that it was already behind him, some-

  where back in that vast obscurity beyond the

  city, where the dark fields of the republic

  rolled on under the night.

  —The Great Gatsby

  What Kind of Times

  Are These

  WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

  There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows

  uphill

  and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

  near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

  who disappeared into those shadows.

  I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but

  don’t be fooled,

  this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

  our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

  its own ways of making people disappear.

  I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

  meeting the unmarked strip of light—

  ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

  I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

  And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

  anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

  to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

  to talk about trees.

  1991

  IN THOSE YEARS

  In those years, people will say, we lost track

  of the meaning of we, of you

  we found ourselves

  reduced to I

  and the whole thing became

  silly, ironic, terrible:

  we were trying to live a personal life and, yes, that was the only life

  we could bear witness to

  But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

  into our personal weather

  They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

  along the shore, through the rags of fog

  where we stood, saying I

  1991

  TO THE DAYS

  From you I want more than I’ve ever asked,

  all of it—the newscasts’ terrible stories

  of life in my time, the knowing it’s worse than that,

  much worse—the knowing what it means to be lied to.

  Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity,

  coffee and bread with sour plum jam.

  Numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods.

  Lives ticking on as if.

  A typewriter’s torrent, suddenly still.

  Blue soaking through fog, two dragonflies wheeling.

  Acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising.

  Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it.

  Suddenly I understand the verb without tenses.

  To smell another woman’s hair, to taste her skin.

  To know the bodies drifting underwater.

  To be human, said Rosa—I can’t teach you that.

  A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds—his moment.

  Surely the love of life is never-ending,

  the failure of nerve, a charred fuse?

  I want more from you than I ever knew to ask.

  Wild pink lilies erupting, tasseled stalks of corn

  in the Mexican gardens, corn and roses.

  Shortening days, strawberry fields in ferment

  with tossed-aside, bruised fruit.

  1991

  MIRACLE ICE CREAM

  Miracle’s truck comes down the little avenue,

  Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,

  and, yes, you can feel happy

  with one piece of your heart.

  Take what’s still given: in a room’s rich shadow

  a woman’s breasts swinging lightly as she bends.

  Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.

  Late, you sit weighing the evening news,

  fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,

  the rest of your heart.

  1992

  RACHEL

  There’s a girl born in abrupt August light

  far north, a light soon to
be peeled

  like an onion, down to nothing. Around her ions are falling

  in torrents, glacial eyes are staring, the monster’s body

  trapped in the bay goes through its spasms.

  What she opens her gray eyes on

  is drastic. Even the man and woman gazing

  into her unfocused gaze, searching for focus,

  are drastic.

  It’s the end of a century.

  If she gets to grow old, if there’s anything

  : anyone to speak, will they say of her,

  She grew up to see it, she was our mother, but

  she was born one of them?

  1992

  AMENDS

  Nights like this:on the cold apple-bough

  a white star, then another

  exploding out of the bark:

  on the ground, moonlight picking at small stones

  as it picks at greater stones, as it rises with the surf

  laying its cheek for moments on the sand

  as it licks the broken ledge, as it flows up the cliffs,

  as it flicks across the tracks

  as it unavailing pours into the gash

  of the sand-and-gravel quarry

  as it leans across the hangared fuselage

  of the crop-dusting plane

  as it soaks through cracks into the trailers

  tremulous with sleep

  as it dwells upon the eyelids of the sleepers

  as if to make amends

  1992

  CALLE VISIÓN

  1

  Not what you thought:just a turn-off

  leading downhill not up

  narrow, doesn’t waste itself

  has a house at the far end

  scrub oak and cactus in the yard

  some catssome snakes

  in the house there is a room

  in the room there is a bed

  on the bed there is a blanket

  that tells the coming of the railroad

  under the blanket there are sheets

  scrubbed transparent here and there

  under the sheets there’s a mattress

  the old rough kind, with buttons and ticking

  under the mattress is a frame

  of rusting ironstill strong

  the whole bed smells of soap and rust

  the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain

  this is your room

  in Calle Visión

  if you took the turn-off

  it was for you

  2

  Calle Visiónsand in your teeth

  granules of cartilage in your wrists

  Calle Visiónfirestorm behind

  shuttered eyelidsfire in your foot

  Calle Visiónrocking the gates

  of your locked bones

  Calle Visióndreamnet dropped

  over your porous sleep

  3

  Lodged in the difficult hotel

  all help withheld

  a place not to live but to die in

  not an inn but a hospital

  a friend’s love came to me

  touched and took me away

  in a carlove

  of a curmudgeon, a short-fuse

  and as he droveeyes on the road

  I felt his love

  and that was simply the casethe way things were

  unstated and apparent

  and like the rest of it

  clear as a dream

  4

  Calle Visiónyour heart beats on unbroken

  how is this possible

  Calle Visiónwounded knee

  wounded spinewounded eye

  Have you ever worked around metal?

  Are there particles under your skin?

  Calle Visiónbut your heart is still whole

  how is this possible

  since what can bewill be taken

  when not offered in trust and faith

  by the collectors of collectibles

  the professors of what-has-been-suffered

  The world is falling downhold my hand

  It’s a lonely soundhold my hand

  Calle Visiónnever forget

  the body’s pain

  never divide it

  5

  Ammonia

  carbon dioxide

  carbon monoxide

  methane

  hydrogen sulfide

  :the gasses that rise from urine and feces

  in the pig confinement units known as nurseries

  can eat a metal doorknob off in half a year

  pig-dander

  dust from dry manure

  —lung-scar:breath-shortedness an early symptom

  And the fire shall try

  every man’s work:Calle Visión:

  and every woman’s

  if you took the turn-off

  this is your revelationthis the source

  6

  The repetitive motions of slaughtering

  —fire in wristsin elbows—

  the dead birds coming at you along the line

  —how you smell them in your sleep—

  fire in your wristblood packed

  under your fingernailsheavy air

  doors padlocked on the outside

  —you might steal a chicken—

  fire in the chicken factory fire

  in the carpal tunnelleaping the frying vats

  yellow smoke from soybean oil

  and wasted parts and insulating wire

  —some fleeing to the freezer some

  found “stuck in poses of escape”—

  7

  You can call on beauty still and it will leap

  from all directions

  you can write beauty into the cruel file

  of things donethings left undonebut

  once we were dissimilar

  yet unseparatethat’s beautythat’s what you catch

  in the newborn’s midnight gaze

  the fog that melts the falling stars

  the virus from the smashed lianas driven

  searching now for us

  8

  In the roomin the house

  in Calle Visión

  all you wantis to lie down

  alone on your backlet your hands

  slide lightly over your hipbones

  But she’s there with her remnants her cross-sections

  trying to distract you

  with her childhood her recipes her

  cargo of charred pages her

  carved and freckled neck-stones

  her crying-out-for-witness her

  backward-forward timescapes

  her suitcase in Berlin

  and the one lost and found

  in her island go-and-come

  —is she terrified you will forget her?

  9

  In the black net

  of her orange wing

  the angry nightblown butterfly

  hangs on a piece of lilac in the sun

  carried overland like her

  from a long way off

  She has travelled hard and far

  and her interrogation goes:

  —Hands dripping with wet earth

  head full of shocking dreams

  O what have you buried all these years

  what have you dug up?

  •

  This place is alive with the dead and with the living

  I have never been alone here

  I wear my triple eye as I walk along the road

  past, present, future all are at my side

  Storm-beaten, tough-winged passenger

  there is nothing I have buried that can die

  10

  On the road there is a house

  scrub oak and cactus in the yard

  lilac carried overland

  from a long way off

  in the house there is a bed

  on the bed there is a blanket

  telling the coming of the railroad
>
  under the mattress there’s a frame

  of rusting ironstill strong

  the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain

  the window smells of old

  tobacco-dust and rain

  1992–1993

  REVERSION

  This woman/the heart of the matter.

  This woman flung into solitary by the prayers of her tribe.

  This woman waking/reaching for scissors/starting to cut

  her hair

  Hair long shaven/growing out.

  To snip to snip to snip/creak of sharpness meeting itself against

  the roughness of her hair.

  This woman whose voices drive her into exile.

  (Exile, exile.)

  Drive her toward the other side.

  By train and foot and ship, to the other side.

  Other side.Of a narrow sea.

 

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