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Collected Poems

Page 56

by Adrienne Rich


  a man has to ask it

  a woman has to answer

  you don’t even think

  2

  What a girl I was then what a body

  ready for breaking open like a lobster

  what a little provincial village

  what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells

  what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud

  what a gone-and-come tidepool

  what a look into eternity I took and did not return it

  what a book I made myself

  what a quicksilver study

  bright little bloodstain

  liquid pouches escaping

  What a girl pelican-skimming over fear what a mica lump

  splitting

  into tiny sharp-edged mirrors through which

  the sun’s eclipse could seem normal

  what a sac of eggs what a drifting flask

  eager to sinkto be found

  to disembodywhat a mass of swimmy legs

  3

  Vic into what shoulder could I have pushed your face

  laying hands first on your head

  onto whose thighs pulled down your head

  which fear of mine would have wound itself

  around which of yourscould we have taken itnakedness

  without spermin what insurrectionary

  convulsion would we have done itmouth to mouth

  mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anusearlobe to nipple

  what seven skins each have to molt what seven shifts

  what tears boil up through sweat to bathe

  what humiliatoriumswhat layers of imposture

  What heroic tremor

  released into pure moisture

  might have soaked our shapetwo-headedavid

  into your heretic

  linen-service

  sheets?

  1997

  “THE NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES”

  1

  The taxi meter clicking up

  loose change who can afford to pay

  basalt blurring spectral headlights

  darkblue stabbed with platinum

  raincoats glassy with evening wet

  the city gathering

  itself for darkness

  into a bitter-chocolate vein

  the east side with its trinkets

  the west side with its memories

  2

  Wherever you had to connect:

  question of passport, glances, bag

  dumped late on the emptied carousel

  departure zones

  where all could become mislaid, disinvented

  undocumented, unverified

  all but the footprint of your soul

  in the cool neutral air

  till the jumbo jet groaned and gathered

  itself over Long Island

  gathered you into your earth-craving

  belly-self, that desire

  3

  Gaze through the sliced-glass window

  nothing is foreign here

  nothing you haven’t thought or taught

  nothing your thumbnail doesn’t know

  your old poets and painters knew it

  knocking back their wine

  you’re just in a cab driven wild

  on the FDR by a Russian Jew

  who can’t afford to care if he lives or dies

  you rode with him long ago

  4

  Between two silvered glass urns an expensive

  textile is shouldered

  it’s after dark now, floodlight

  pours into the wired boutique

  there are live roses in the urns

  there are security codes

  in the wallthere are children, dead, near death

  whose fingers worked this

  intricate

  desirable thing

  —nothing you haven’t seen on your palm

  nothing your thumbnail doesn’t know

  5

  After one stroke she looks at the river

  remembers her name—Muriel

  writes it in her breath

  on the big windowpane

  never again perhaps

  to walk in the city freely

  but here is her landscape this old

  industrial building converted

  for artists

  her riverthe Lordly Hudson

  Paul named itwhich has no peer

  in Europe or the East

  her mind on that waterwidening

  6

  Among five men walks a woman

  tall as the tallest man, taller than several

  a mixed creature

  from country povertygood schooling

  and from that position seeing

  further than many

  beauty, fame, notwithstandingstanding

  for something else

  —Where do you come from?—

  —Como tú, like you, from nothing—

  Julia de Burgos, of herself, fallen

  in Puerto Rican Harlem

  7

  Sometime tonight you’ll fall down

  on a bed far from your heart’s desire

  in the city as it is

  for you now:her face or his

  private across an aisle

  throttling uptown

  bent over clasped hands or

  staring off then suddenly glaring:

  Back off! Don’t ask!you will meet those eyes

  (none of them meeting)

  8

  The wrapped candies from Cleveland

  The acclaim of East St. Louis

  deadweight trophies borne

  through interboro fissures of the mind

  in search of Charlie Parker

  —Where are you sleeping tonight? with whom?

  in crippled Roebling’s harbor room

  where he watched his bridge transpire?—

  HartMilesMurielJuliaPaul

  you will meet the eyes you were searching for

  and the day will break

  as we say, it breaks

  as we don’t say, of the night

  as we don’t say of the night

  1997

  RUSTED LEGACY

  Imagine a city where nothing’s

  forgivenyour deed adheres

  to you like a scar, a tattoobut almost everything’s

  forgottendeer flattened leaping a highway for food

  the precise reason for the shaving of the confused girl’s head

  the small boys’ punishing of the frogs

  —a city memory-starved but intent on retributions

  Imagine the architecturethe governance

  the men and the women in power

  —tell me if it is not true you still

  live in that city.

  Imagine a city partitioneddivorced from its hills

  where temples and telescopes used to probe the stormy codices

  a city brailling through fog

  thicket and twisted wire

  into dark’s velvet dialectic

  sewers which are also rivers

  art’s unchartered aquifersthe springhead

  sprung open in civic gardens left unlocked at night

  I finger the glass beads I strung and wore

  under the pines while the arrests were going on

  (transfixed from neck to groin I wanted to save what I could)

  They brought trays with little glasses of cold water

  into the dark parka final village gesture

  before the villages were gutted.

  They were trying to save what they could

  —tell me if this is not the same city.

  I have forced myself to come back like a daughter

  required to put her mother’s house in order

  whose hands need terrible gloves to handle

  the medicinalsthe disease packed in those linens

  Accomplished criminal I’ve been but

  c
an I accomplish justice here? Tear the old wedding sheets

  into cleaning rags? Faithless daughter

  like stonebut with water pleating across

  Let water be water let stone be stone

  Tell me is this the same city.

  This I—must she, must she lie scabbed with rust

  crammed with memory in a place

  of little anecdotesno one left

  to go around gathering the full dissident story?

  Rusting her hands and shoulders stone her lips

  yet leaching down from her eyesockets tears

  —for one self only? each encysts a city.

  1997

  A LONG CONVERSATION

  —warm bloom of blood in the child’s arterial tree

  could you forget?do you

  remember?not to

  know you were cold?Altercations

  from porchescolor still high in your cheeks

  the leap for the catch

  the game getting wilder as the lights come on

  catching your death it was said

  your death of cold

  something you couldn’t see ahead, you couldn’t see

  (energy:Eternal Delight)

  •

  a long conversation

  between persistence and impatience

  between the bench of forced confessions

  hip from groin swiveled

  apart

  young tongues torn in the webbing

  the order of the cities

  founded on disorder

  and intimate resistance

  desire exposed and shameless

  as the flags go by

  •

  Sometime looking backward

  into this future, straining

  neck and eyes I’ll meet your shadow

  with its enormous eyes

  you who will want to know

  what this was all about

  Maybe this is the beginning of madness

  Maybe it’s your conscience …

  as you, straining neck and eyes

  gaze forward into this past:

  what did it mean to you?

  —to receive “full human rights”

  or the blue aperture of hope?

  •

  Mrs. Bartender, will you tell us dear

  who came in when the nights were

  cold and drear and who sat where

  well helmeted and who

  was showing off his greasy hair

  Mrs. Bartender tell me quickly

  who spoke thickly or not at all

  how you decided what you’d abide

  what was proud and thus allowed

  how you knew what to do

  with all the city threw at you

  Mrs. Bartender tell me true

  we’ve been keeping an eye on you

  and this could be a long conversation

  we could have a long accommodation

  •

  On the oilcloth of a certain table, in the motel room of a certain time and country, a white plastic saucer of cheese and hard salami, winter radishes, cold cuts, a chunk of bread, a bottle of red wine, another of water proclaimed drinkable. Someone has brought pills for the infection that is ransacking this region. Someone else came to clean birds salvaged from the oil spill. Here we eat, drink from thick tumblers, try to pierce this thicket with mere words.

  Like a little cell. Let’s not aggrandize ourselves; we are not a little cell, but we are like a little cell.

  Music arrives, searching for us. What hope or memory without it. Whatever we may think. After so many words.

  •

  A long conversation

  pierced, jammed, scratched out:

  bans, preventive detention, broken mouths

  and on the scarred bench sequestered

  a human creature with bloody wings

  its private parts

  reamed

  still trying to speak

  A hundred and fifty years. In 1848 a pamphlet was published, one of many but the longest-read. One chapter in the long book of memories and expectations. A chapter described to us as evil; if not evil out-of-date, naïve and mildewed. Even the book they say is out of print, lacking popular demand.

  So we have to find out what in fact that manifesto said. Evil, we can judge. Mildew doesn’t worry us. We don’t want to be more naïve or out-of-date than necessary. Some old books are probably more useful than others.

  The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … it creates a world after its own image.

  In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed—a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

  —Can we say if or how we find this true in our lives today?

  She stands before us as if we are a class, in school, but we are long out of school. Still, there’s that way she has of holding the book in her hands, as if she knew it contained the answer to her question.

  Someone: —Technology’s changing the most ordinary forms of human contact—who can’t see that, in their own life?

  —But technology is nothing but a means.

  —Someone, I say, makes a killing off war. You:—I’ve been telling you, that’s the engine driving the free market. Not information, militarization. Arsenals spawning wealth.

  Another woman: —But surely then patriarchal nationalism is the key?

  He comes in late, as usual he’s been listening to sounds outside, the tide scraping the stones, the voices in nearby cottages, the way he used to listen at the beach, as a child. He doesn’t speak like a teacher, more like a journalist come back from war to report to us.—It isn’t nations anymore, look at the civil wars in all the cities. Is there a proletariat that can act effectively on this collusion, between the state and the armed and murderous splinter groups roaming at large? How could all these private arsenals exist without the export of increasingly sophisticated arms approved by the metropolitan bourgeoisie?

  Now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: —I can’t stand that kind of language. I still care about poetry.

  All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you’re only

  as we weretrying

  to keep an eye

  on the weapons on the street

  and under the street

  Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can’t get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can’t fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc … & if it does not improve your thinking about the important question of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?

  You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty,” “probability,” perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s MOST important.

  His high-pitched voice with its darker, hoarser undertone.

  At least he didn’t walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.

  •

  So now your paledark face thrown up

  into pre-rain silver light your white shirt takes

  o
n the hurl and flutter of the gull’s wings

  over your dark leggings their leathery legs

  flash past your hurling arm one hand

  snatching crusts from the bowl another hand holds close

  You, barefoot on that narrow strand

  with the iceplant edges and the long spindly pier

  you just as the rain starts leaping into the bay

  in your cloud of black, bronze and silvering hair

  •

  Later by the window on a fast-gathering winter evening

  my eyes on the page then catch your face your breasts that light

  … small tradespeople,

  shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and peasants—

  all these sink gradually into the proletariat

  partly because their

  diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which

  modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the

  competition with the large capitalists

  partly because their specialized

  skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.

  Thus, the proletariat is recruited

  from all classes of the population. …

  pelicans and cormorants stumbling up the bay

 

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