Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

the last gash of light abruptly bandaged in darkness

  •

  1799, Coleridge to Wordsworth:I wish

  you would write a poem

  addressed to those who, in consequence

  of the complete failure of the French Revolution

  have thrown up all hopes

  of the amelioration of mankind

  and are sinking into an almost epicurean

  selfishness, disguising the same

  under the soft titles of domestic attachment

  and contempt for visionary philosophes

  A generation later, revolutions scorching Europe:

  the visionaries having survived despite

  rumors of complete failure

  the words have barely begunto match the desire

  when the cold fog blows back in

  organized and disordering

  muffling words and faces

  Your lashes, visionary! screening

  in sudden rushes this

  shocked, abraded crystal

  •

  I can imagine a sentence that might someday end with the word, love. Like the one written by that asthmatic young man, which begins, At the risk of appearing ridiculous … It would have to contain losses, resiliencies, histories faced; it would have to contain a face—his yours hers mine—by which I could do well, embracing it like water in my hands, because by then we could be sure that “doing well” by one, or some, was immiserating nobody. A true sentence then, for greeting the newborn. (—Someplace else. In our hopes.)

  But where ordinary collective affections carry a price (swamped, or accounted worthless) I’m one of those driven seabirds stamping oil-distempered watersmaimed “by natural causes.”

  The music’s pirated from somewhere else: Catalan songs reaching us after fifty years. Old nuevos canciones, after twenty years? In them, something about the sweetness of life, the memory of traditions of mercy, struggles for justice. A long throat, casting memory forward.

  •

  “it’s the layers of history

  we have to choose, along

  with our own practice: what must be tried again

  over and over and

  what must not be repeated

  and at what depthwhich layer

  will we meet others”

  the words barely begin

  to match the desire

  and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn’t testify

  … the eye has become a human eye

  when its object has become a human, social object

  BRECHT BECOMES GERMAN ICON ANEW

  FORGIVEN MARXIST IDEAS

  … the Arts, you know—they’re Jews, they’re left-wing,

  in other words, stay away …

  •

  So, Bo Kunstelaar, tell us true

  how you still do what you do

  your old theories forgiven

  —the public understands

  it was one thing then but now is now

  and everyone says your lungs are bad

  and your liver very sad

  and the force of your imagination

  has no present destination

  though subversive has a certain charm

  and art can really do no harm

  but still they say you get up and go

  every morning to the studio

  Is it still a thrill?

  or an act of will?

  Mr. Kunstelaar?

  •

  —After so long, to be asked an opinion? Most of that time, the opinions unwelcome. But opinion anyway was never art. Along the way I was dropped by some; others could say I had dropped them. I tried to make in my studio what I could not make outside it. Even to have a studio, or a separate room to sleep in, was a point in fact. In case you miss the point: I come from hod-carriers, lint-pickers, people who hauled cables through half-dug tunnels. Their bodies created the possibility of my existence. I come from the kind of family where loss means not just grief but utter ruin—adults and children dispersed into prostitution, orphanages, juvenile prisons, emigration—never to meet again. I wanted to show those lives—designated insignificant—as beauty, as terror. They were significant to me and what they had endured terrified me. I knew such a life could have been my own. I also knew they had saved me from it.

  —I tried to show all this and as well to make an art as impersonal as it demanded.

  —I have no theories. I don’t know what I am being forgiven. I am my art: I make it from my body and the bodies that produced mine. I am still trying to find the pictorial language for this anger and fear rotating on an axle of love. If I still get up and go to the studio—it’s there I find the company I need to go on working.

  •

  “This is for you

  this little song

  without much style

  because your smile

  fell like a red leaf

  through my tears

  in those fogbound years

  when without ado

  you gave me a bundle of fuel to burn

  when my body was utterly cold

  This is for you

  who would not applaud

  when with a kick to the breast or groin

  they dragged us into the van

  when flushed faces cheered

  at our disgrace

  or looked awaythis is

  for you who stayed

  to see us through

  delivered our bail and disappeared

  This little song

  without much style

  may it find you

  somewherewell.”

  •

  In the dark windowglass

  a blurred face

  —is it still mine?

  Who out there hoped to change me—

  what out there has tried?

  What sways and presses against the pane

  what can’t I see beyond or through—

  charred, crumpled, ever-changing human language

  is that still you?

  1997–98

  FOX

  (1998–2000)

  For Michelle, again, after twenty-five years

  Y in alto cielo, su fondo estrellado

  Y en las multitudes, la mujer que amo

  VICTORY

  Something spreading underground won’t speak to us

  under skin won’t declare itself

  not all life-forms want dialogue with the

  machine-gods in their dramahogging down

  the deep bushclear-cutting refugees

  from ancient or transient villages into

  our opportunistic fervorto search

  crazily for a hosta lifeboat

  Suddenly instead of art we’re eyeing

  organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies

  cruel bluesembroidered purplessuccinct yellows

  a beautiful tumor

  •

  I guess you’re not aloneI fear you’re alone

  There’s, of course, poetry:

  awful bridge rising over naked air:I first

  took it as just a continuation of the road:

  “a masterpiece of engineering

  praised, etc.”then on the radio:

  “incline too steep for ease of, etc.”

  Drove it nonetheless because I had to

  this being how—So this is how

  I find you:alive and more

  •

  As if (how many conditionals must we suffer?)

  I’m driving to your side

  —an intimate collusion—

  packed in the trunk my bag of foils for fencing with pain

  glasses of varying spectrum for sun or fog or sun-struck

  rain or bitterest night my sack of hidden

  poetries, old glue shredding from their spines

  my time exposure of the Leonids

  over Joshua Tree

  As if we’re going to win thisO because

  •

  If you h
ave a sister I am not she

  nor your mother nor you my daughter

  nor are we lovers or any kind of couple

  except in the intensive care

  of poetry and

  death’s master planarchitecture-in-progress

  draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome

  the master left on your doorstep

  with a white card in black calligraphy:

  Make what you will of this

  As if leaving purple roses

  •

  If (how many conditionals must we suffer?)

  I tell you a letter from the master

  is lying on my own doorstep

  glued there with leaves and rain

  and I haven’t bent to it yet

  if I tell you I surmise

  he writes differently to me:

  Do as you will, you have had your life

  many have not

  signing it in his olden script:

  Meister aus Deutschland

  •

  In coldest Europeend of that war

  frozen domesiron railings frozenstoves lit in the

  streets

  memory banks of cold

  the Nike of Samothrace

  on a staircasewings in blazing

  backdraftsaid to me

  : : to everyone she met

  Displaced, amputatednever discount me

  Victory

  indented in disasterstriding

  at the head of stairs

  For Tory Dent

  1998

  VETERANS DAY

  1

  No flag heavy or full enough to hide this face

  this body swung home from homesewn into its skin

  Let youentrusted to close the box

  for final drapingtake care

  what might be due

  to the citizen wounded

  by no foreign blast nor shell(is this

  body a child’s?if?why?)

  eyes hooded in refusal—

  over these to lower the nation’s pall, thick flutter

  this body shriveled into itself

  —a normal process they have said

  The face?another story, a flag

  hung upside down against glory’s orders

  2

  Trying to think about

  something else—what?—when?

  the story broke

  the scissor-fingered prestidigitators

  snipped the links of concentration

  State vs memory

  State vs unarmed citizen

  wounded by no foreign blast nor shell

  forced into the sick-field

  brains-out coughing downwind

  backing into the alleyhands shielding eyes

  under glare-lit choppers coming throughlow

  3

  In the dream you—is it?—set down

  two packages in brown paper

  saying, Without such means

  there can be no end

  to the wrenching of mind

  from body, the degradation

  no end to everything you hate

  and have exposed, lie upon lie

  I think: We’ve been dying slowly

  now we’ll be blown to bits

  I think you’re testing me

  “how vitally we desired disaster”

  You say, there can be no poetry

  without the demolition

  of language, no end to everything you hate

  lies upon lies

  I think: you’re testing me

  testing us both

  but isn’t this what it means to live—

  pushing further the conditions in which we breathe?

  4

  In the college parlor by the fireplace

  ankled and waisted with bells

  he, inclined by nature toward tragic themes

  chants of the eradication of tribal life

  in a blue-eyed trance

  shaking his neckbent silvering hair

  Afterward, wine and cake at the Provost’s house

  and this is surely no dream, how the beneficiary

  of atrocities yearns toward innocence

  and this is surely a theme, the vengeful rupture

  of prized familiar ways

  and calculated methods

  for those who were thereBut for those elsewhere

  it’s something else, not herds hunted down cliffs

  maybe a buffalo burger in the

  tribal college cafeteria

  and computer skills after lunchWho wants to be tragic?

  The college coheres out of old quonset huts

  demolition-scavenged doors, donated labor

  used textbooks, no waste, passion

  5

  Horned blazing fronds of Sierra ice

  grow hidden rivulets, last evening’s raindrop pulses

  in the echeveria’s cup next morning, fogdrip darkens the

  road

  under fire-naked bishop pines

  thick sweats form on skins

  of pitched-out nectarines, dumpster shrine

  of miracles of truths of mold

  Rain streaming, stroking

  a broken windowpane

  When the story broke I thought

  I was thinking about water

  how it is most of what we are

  and became bottled chic

  such thoughts are soon interrupted

  6

  When the story broke we were trying to think

  about historywent on stubbornly thinking

  though history plunged

  with muddy spursscreamed at us for trying

  to plunder its nestseize its nestlings

  capture tame and sell them or something

  after the manner of our kind

  Well, was it our secret hope?

  —a history you could seize

  (as in old folios of “natural history”

  each type and order pictured in its place?)

  —Back to the shambles, comrades.

  where the story is always breaking

  downhaving to be repaired

  7

  Under the small plane’s fast shadow an autumn

  afternoon bends sharply

  —swathes of golden membrane, occult blood

  seeping up through the great groves

  where the intestinal the intestate

  blood-cords of the stags are strung from tree to tree

  I know already where we’re landing

  what cargo we’ll take on

  boxed for the final draping

  coming home from homesewn into its skin

  eyes hooded in refusal

  —what might be due—

  1998–1999

  FOR THIS

  If I’ve reached for your lines(I have)

  like letters from the dead that stir the nerves

  dowsed you for a springhead

  to water my thirst

  dug into my compost skeletons and petals

  you surely meant to catch the light:

  —at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered

  stateless underground

  have I a plea?

  If I’ve touched your finger

  with a ravenous tongue

  licked from your palm a rift of salt

  if I’ve dreamt or thought you

  a pack of bloodfresh-drawn

  hanging darkred from a hook

  higher than my heart

  (you who understand transfusion)

  where else should I appeal?

  A pilot light lies low

  while the gas jets sleep

  (a cat getting toed from stove

  into nocturnal ice)

  language uncommon and agile as truth

  melts down the most intractable silence

  A lighthouse keeper’s ethics:

  you tend for all or none

  for this you might set your furniture on fire

 
A this we have blundered over

  as if the lamp could be shut off at will

  rescue denied for some

  and still a lighthouse be

  1999

  REGARDLESS

  An idea declared itself between us

  clear as a washed wineglass

  that we’d love

  regardless of manifestos I wrote or signed

  my optimism of the will

  regardless

  your wincing at manifestos

  your practice of despair you named

  anarchism

  : : an idea we could meet

  somewhere elsea road

  straggling unmarked through ice-plant

  toward an oceanheartless as eternity

  Still hungry for freedomI walked off

  from glazed documentsbecalmed

  passionstime of splintering and sawdust

  pieces lying stillI was not myself but

  I found a road like thatit straggled

  The ocean still

  looked like eternity

  I drew it on a

  napkin mailed it to you

  On your hands you wear work gloves stiffened

  in liquids your own body has expressed

  : : what stiffens hardest?tears? blood? urine? sweat? the first