Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

and disappeared.

  One sleepwalking on the trestle

  of privilege dreaming of innocence

  tossing her cigarette into the dry gully

  —an innocent gesture.

  •

  Medbh’s postcard from Belfast:

  one’s poetry seems aimless

  covered in the blood and lies

  oozing corrupt & artificial

  but of course one will continue …

  This week I’ve dredged my pages

  for anything usable

  head, heart, perforated

  by raw disgust and fear

  If I dredge up anything it’s suffused

  by what it works in, “like the dyer’s hand”

  I name it unsteady, slick, unworthy

  and I go on

  In my sixty-fifth year I know something about language:

  it can eat or be eaten by experience

  Medbh, poetry means refusing

  the choice to kill or die

  but this life of continuing is for the sane mad

  and the bravest monsters

  •

  The bright planet that plies her crescent shape

  in the western airthat through the screendoor gazes

  with her curved eye now speaks:The beauty of darkness

  is how it lets you see.Through the screendoor

  she told me this and half-awake I scrawled

  her words on a piece of paper.

  She is called Venus but I call her You

  Youwho sees meYouwho calls me to see

  Youwho has other errands far away in space and time

  Youin your fiery skinacetylene

  scorching the claims of the false mystics

  Youwho like the moon arrives in crescent

  changeable changerspeaking truth from darkness

  •

  Edgelit:firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds

  blue-green agavegrown huge in flower

  cries of birds streaming over

  The night of the eclipse the full

  moon

  swims clear between flying clouds until

  the hour of the occlusionIt’s not of aging

  anymore and its desire

  which is of course unending

  it’s of dyingyoung or old

  in full desire

  Remember me . … O, O, O,

  O, remember me

  these vivid stricken cells

  precarious living marrow

  this my labyrinthine filmic brain

  this my dreaded blood

  this my irreplaceable

  footprint vanishing from the air

  dying in full desire

  thirsting for the coldest water

  hungering for hottest food

  gazing into the wildest light

  edgelight from the high desert

  where shadows drip from tiniest stones

  sunklight of bloody afterglow

  torque of the Joshua tree

  flinging itself forth in winter

  factoring freeze into its liquid consciousness

  These are the extremes I stoke

  into the updraft of this life

  still roaring

  into thinnest air

  1993–1994

  MIDNIGHT SALVAGE

  (1995–1998)

  I don’t know how to measure happiness. The issue is happiness, there is no other issue, or no other issue one has a right to think about for other people, to think about politically, but I don’t know how to measure happiness.

  —GEORGE OPPEN, LETTER TO JUNE OPPEN DEGNAN, AUGUST 5, 1970

  THE ART OF TRANSLATION

  1

  To have seen you exactly, once:

  red hair over cold cheeks fresh from the freeway

  your lingo, your daunting and dauntless

  eyes. But then to lift toward home, mile upon mile

  back where they’d barely heard your name

  —neither as terrorist nor as genius would they detain you—

  to wing it back to my country bearing

  your war-flecked protocols—

  that was a mission, surely: my art’s pouch

  crammed with your bristling juices

  sweet dark drops of your spirit

  that streaked the pouch, the shirt I wore

  and the bench on which I leaned.

  2

  It’s only a branch like any other

  green with the flare of life in it

  and if I hold this end, you the other

  that means it’s broken

  broken between us, broken despite us

  broken and therefore dying

  broken by force, broken by lying

  green, with the flare of life in it

  3

  But say we’re crouching on the ground like children

  over a mess of marbles, soda caps, foil, old foreign coins

  —the first truly precious objects. Rusty hooks, glass.

  Say I saw the earring first but you wanted it.

  Then you wanted the words I’d found. I’d give you

  the earring, crushed lapis if it were,

  I would look long at the beach glass and the sharded self

  of the lightbulb. Long I’d look into your hand

  at the obsolete copper profile, the cat’s-eye, the lapis.

  Like a thief I would deny the words, deny they ever

  existed, were spoken, or could be spoken,

  like a thief I’d bury them and remember where.

  4

  The trade names follow trade

  the translators stopped at passport control:

  Occupation: no such designation—

  Journalist, maybe spy?

  That the books are for personal use

  only—could I swear it?

  That not a word of them

  is contraband—how could I prove it?

  1995

  FOR AN ANNIVERSARY

  The wing of the osprey lifted

  over the nest on Tomales Bay

  into fog and difficult gust

  raking treetops from Inverness Ridge on over

  The left wing shouldered into protective

  gesture the left wing we thought broken

  and the young beneath in the windy nest

  creaking there in their hunger

  and the tides beseeching, besieging

  the bay in its ruined languor

  1996

  MIDNIGHT SALVAGE

  1

  Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I

  sought the light of a so-called heavenly body

  : : a planet or our moon in some event and caught

  nothing nothing but a late wind

  pushing around some Monterey pines

  themselves in trouble and rust-limbed

  Nine o’clock : : July : the light

  undrained : : that blotted blue

  that lets has let will let

  thought’s blood ebb between life- and death-time

  darkred behind darkblue

  bad news pulsing back and forth of “us” and “them”

  And all I wanted was to find an old

  friend an old figure an old trigonometry

  still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold

  2

  Under the conditions of my hiring

  I could profess or declare anything at all

  since in that place nothing would change

  So many fountains, such guitars at sunset

  Did not want any more to sit under such a window’s

  deep embrasure, wisteria bulging on spring air

  in that borrowed chair

  with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk

  under photographs of the spanish steps, Keats’ death mask

  and the English cemetery all so under control and so eternal

  in burnished frames : : or occupy the office

  of the marxist-on-sabbatic
al

  with Gramsci’s fast-fading eyes

  thumbtacked on one wall opposite a fading print

  of the same cemetery : : had memories

  and death masks of my own : : could not any more

  peruse young faces already straining for

  the production of slender testaments

  to swift reading and current thinking : : would not wait

  for the stroke of noon to declare all passions obsolete

  Could not play by the rules

  in that palmy place : : nor stand at lectern professing

  anything at all

  in their hire

  3

  Had never expected hope would form itself

  completely in my time : : was never so sanguine

  as to believe old injuries could transmute easily

  through any singular event or idea : : never

  so feckless as to ignore the managed contagion

  of ignorance the contrived discontinuities

  the felling of leaders and future leaders

  the pathetic erections of soothsayers

  But thought I was conspiring, breathing-along

  with history’s systole-diastole

  twenty thousand leagues under the sea a mammal heartbeat

  sheltering another heartbeat

  plunging from the Farallons all the way to Baja

  sending up here or there a blowhole signal

  and sometimes beached

  making for warmer waters

  where the new would be delivered : : though I would not see it

  4

  But neither was expecting in my time

  to witness this : : wasn’t deep

  lucid or mindful you might say enough

  to look through history’s bloodshot eyes

  into this commerce this dreadnought wreck cut loose

  from all vows, oaths, patents, compacts, promises : :

  To see

  not O my Captain

  fallen cold & dead by the assassin’s hand

  but cold alive & cringing : : drinking with the assassins

  in suit of noir Hong Kong silk

  pushing his daughter in her famine-

  waisted flamingo gown

  out on the dance floor with the traffickers

  in nerve gas saying to them Go for it

  and to the girl Get with it

  5

  When I ate and drank liberation once I walked

  arm-in-arm with someone who said she had something to teach me

  It was the avenue and the dwellers

  free of home : roofless : : women

  without pots to scour or beds to make

  or combs to run through hair

  or hot water for lifting grease or cans

  to open or soap to slip in that way

  under arms then beneath breasts then downward to thighs

  Oil-drums were alight under the freeway

  and bottles reached from pallets of cardboard corrugate

  and piles of lost and found to be traded back and forth

  and figures arranging themselves from the wind

  Through all this she walked me : : And said

  My name is Liberation and I come from here

  Of what are you afraid?

  We’ve hung late in the bars like bats

  kissed goodnight at the stoplights

  —did you think I wore this city without pain?

  did you think I had no family?

  6

  Past the curve where the old craftsman was run down

  there’s a yard called Midnight Salvage

  He was walking in the road which was always safe

  The young driver did not know that road

  its curves or that people walked there

  or that you could speed yet hold the curve

  watching for those who walked there

  such skills he did not have being in life unpracticed

  but I have driven that road in madness and driving rain

  thirty years in love and pleasure and grief-blind

  on ice I have driven it and in the vague haze of summer

  between clumps of daisies and sting of fresh cowflop odors

  lucky I am I hit nobody old or young

  killed nobody left no trace

  practiced in life as I am

  7

  This horrible patience which is part of the work

  This patience which waits for language for meaning for the

  least sign

  This encumbered plodding state doggedly dragging

  the IV up and down the corridor

  with the plastic sack of bloodstained urine

  Only so can you start living again

  waking to take the temperature of the soul

  when the black irises lean at dawn

  from the mouth of the bedside pitcher

  This condition in which you swear I will

  submit to whatever poetry is

  I accept no limits Horrible patience

  8

  You cannot eat an eggYou don’t know where it’s been

  The ordinary body of the hen

  vouchsafes no safetyThe countryside refuses to supply

  Milk is powderedmeat’s in both senses high

  Old walls the pride of architectscollapsing

  find us in crazed nichessleeping like foxes

  we wanters we unwanted we

  wanted for the crime of being ourselves

  Fame slides on its belly like any other animal after food

  Ruins are disruptions of system leaking in

  weeds and lightredrawing

  the City of Expectations

  You cannot eat an eggUnstupefied not unhappy

  we braise wild greens and garlicfeed the feral cats

  and when the fog’s irregular documents break open

  scan its fissures for young stars

  in the belt of Orion

  1996

  CHAR

  1

  There is bracken there is the dark mulberry

  there is the village where no villager survived

  there are the hitlerians there are the foresters

  feeding the partisans from frugal larders

  there is the moon ablaze in every quarter

  there is the moon “of tin and sage” and unseen pilots dropping

  explosive gifts into meadows of fog and crickets

  there is the cuckoo and the tiny snake

  there is the table set at every meal

  for freedom whose chair stays vacant

  the young men in their newfound passions

  (Love along with them the ones they love)

  Obscurity, code, the invisible existence

  of a thrush in the reeds, the poet watching

  as the blood washes off the revolver in the bucket

  Redbreast, your song shakes loose a ruin of memories

  A horrible day … Perhaps he knew, at that final instant?

  The village had to be spared at any price …

  How can you hear me? I speak from so far …

  The flowering broom hid us in a blazing yellow mist …

  2

  This war will prolong itself beyond any platonic armistice. The implanting

  of political concepts will go on amid upheavals and under cover of self-

  confident hypocrisy. Don’t smile. Thrust aside both skepticism and

  resignation and prepare your soul to face an intramural confrontation with

  demons as cold-blooded as microbes.

  The poet in wartime, the Surréalistes’ younger brother

  turned realist (the village had to be spared at any price)

  all eyes on him in the woods crammed with maquisards ex-

  pecting him to signal to fire and save their comrade

  shook his head and watched Bernard’s execution

  knowing that the random shooting of a revolver

  may be the simplest
surreal act but never

  changes the balance of power and that real acts are not simple

  The poet, prone to exaggerate, thinks clearly under torture

  knowing the end of the war

  would mean no end to the microbes frozen in each soul

  the young freedom fighters

  in love with the Resistance

  fed by a thrill for violence

  familiar as his own jaw under the razor

  3

  Insoluble riverrain conscience echo of the future

  I keep vigil for you here by the reeds of Elkhorn Slough

  and the brown mouth of the Salinas River going green

  where the white egret fishes the fragile margins

  Hermetic guide in resistance I’ve found you and lost you

  several times in my lifeYou were never just

  the poet appalled and transfixed by war you were the maker

  of terrible delicate decisions and that did not smudge

  your sense of limitsYou saw squirrels crashing

  from the tops of burning pines when the canister exploded

  and worse and worse and you were in charge of every risk

  the incendiary motives of others were in your charge

  and the need for a courage wrapped in absolute tact

  and you decided and lived like that and you

  held poetry at your lips a piece of wild thyme ripped

  from a burning meadow a mimosa twig

  from still unravaged countryYou kept your senses

  about you like that and like this I keep vigil for you.

  1996

  MODOTTI

  Your footprints of light on sensitive paper

  that typewriter you made famous