Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 58

by Adrienne Rich


  drops from the penis?

  Your glove then meets my handthis is our meeting

  Which of us has gone furthest?

  To meet you like this I’ve had to rise

  from love in a room

  of green leaves larger than my clitoris or my brain

  in a climate where winter never precisely

  does or does not engrave its name on the windowpane

  while the Pacific lays down its right of way

  to the other side of the world

  : : to a table where singed manifestos

  curl back crying to be reread

  but can I even provoke you

  joking or

  in tears

  youin long-stiffened glovesstill

  protector of despair?

  For H.C.

  1998–1999

  SIGNATURES

  It would have made no difference who commanded us in

  those first hours. …

  —veteran, invasion of Normandy, 1944

  That was no country for old women … Someone from D-Day

  at the redgold turn of the party

  recites his line of Yeats with a sex-change

  someone already stricken

  in his urethrarising four times nightly

  Went through that and still despises …

  Here an old woman’s best country is her art

  or it’s not her country

  Here the old don’t pity the old

  As when young we scale our rock face

  relentless, avid

  looking sometimes back at the whole terrain:

  —those scrapings on the rocks

  are they a poet’s signature?

  a mother’s who tried for all her worth to cling

  to the steepwith the small soft claws gripping her back?

  1998

  NORA’S GAZE

  Clayton, we can’t

  have it both ways:

  Nora’s art

  was erotic

  not sensual

  yet how can that be?

  Mostly, she handled

  the body in a bleak light

  —surely that was her right

  to make such paintings, drawings more

  than paintings anyway—

  grey-brown, black, white-grey

  —not the usual hues encoding

  sensual encounter

  but how she figured it

  and stained it

  And had she painted

  the deep-dyed swollen shaft

  the balls’ magenta shadow

  in dark dominion

  that

  might have “done well”

  But to paint and paint again

  the penis as a workaday

  routine

  wintry morning thing

  under a gaze

  expert and merciful as hers

  that was heinous

  and her genius

  still lies chained

  till that is told

  You a man

  I a woman tell it

  none of it lessens her

  For Clayton Eshleman

  1998

  ARCHITECT

  Nothing he had done before

  or would try for later

  will explain or atone

  this facile suggestion of crossbeams

  languid elevations traced on water

  his stake in white colonnades cramping his talent

  showing up in

  facsimile mansions overbearing the neighborhood

  his leaving the steel rods out of the plinths

  (bronze raptors gazing from the boxwood)

  You could say he spread himself too thina plasterer’s term

  you could say he was then

  skating thin icehis stake in white colonnades against the

  thinness of

  ice itselfa slickened ground

  Could say he did not then love

  his art enough to love anything more

  Could say he wanted the commission so

  badly betrayed those who hired himan artist

  who in dreams followed

  the crowds who followed him

  Imagine commandeering those oversize those prized

  hardwood columns to be hoisted and hung

  by hands expert and steady on powerful machines

  his knowledge using theirs as the one kind does the

  other (as it did in Egypt)

  —while devising the little fountain to run all night

  outside the master bedroom

  1998–1999

  FOX

  I needed foxBadly I needed

  a vixen for the long time none had come near me

  I needed recognition from a

  triangulated faceburnt-yellow eyes

  fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail

  I needed history of foxbriars of legend it was said she had run through

  I was in want of fox

  And the truth of briars she had to have run through

  I craved to feel on her peltif my hands could even slide

  past or her body slide between themsharp truth distressing surfaces

  of fur

  lacerated skin calling legend to account

  a vixen’s courage in vixen terms

  For a human animal to call for help

  on another animal

  is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth

  come a long way down

  Go back far enough it means tearing and tornendless and sudden

  back far enough it blurts

  into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child

  pushed out of a femalethe yet-to-be woman

  1998

  MESSAGES

  I love the infinity of these silent spaces

  Darkblue shot with deathrays but only a short distance

  Keep of course water and batteries, antibiotics

  Always look at California for the last time

  We weren’t birds, were we, to flutter past each other

  But what were we meant to do, standing or lying down

  Together on the bare slope where we were driven

  The most personal feelings become historical

  Keep your hands knotted deep inside your sweater

  While the instruments of force are more credible than beauty

  Inside a glass paperweight dust swirls and settles (Manzanar)

  Where was the beauty anyway when we shouldered past each other

  Where is it now in the hollow lounge

  Of the grounded airline where the cameras

  For the desouling project are being handed out

  Each of us instructed to shoot the others naked

  If you want to feel the true time of our universe

  Put your hands over mine on the stainless pelvic rudder

  No, here(sometimes the most impassive ones will shudder)

  The infinity of these spaces comforts me

  Simple textures falling open like a sweater

  1999

  FIRE

  in the old cityincendiaries abound

  who hate this place stuck to their foot soles

  Michael Burnhard is being held and I

  can tell you about himpushed-out and living

  across the riverlow-ground given to flooding

  in a shotgun house

  his mother working for a hospital

  or restaurantdumpstersshe said a restaurant

  hospital cafeteria who cares

  what story

  you bring home with the food

  I can tell you Michael knows beauty

  from the frog-iris in mud

  the squelch of ankles

  stalking the waterlily

  the blues beat flung across water from the old city

  Michael Burnhard in Black History Month

  not his month only he was born there

  not black and almost with
out birthday one

  February 29 Michael Burnhard

  on the other side of the river

  glancing any night at his mother’s wrists

  crosshatched raw

  beside the black-opal stream

  Michael Burnhard still beside himself

  when fire took the old city

  lying like a black spider on its back

  under the satellites and a few true stars

  1999

  TWILIGHT

  Mudseason dusk schoolmaster:pressed out of rain my spine

  on your grey dormitory

  chiseled from Barre

  caught now in your blurred story

  hauling my jacket overshoulder

  against your rectilinear stones

  Out of the rain I waited

  in a damp parlor ghosted

  with little gifts and candy toys

  pitting my brain against your will

  Could rays from my pupils dissect

  mortarpry boards from floor

  probe the magnetic field of your

  granitic clarity

  Schoolmaster: could swear I’ve caught your upper-window profile

  bent down on this little kingdomdreamed your advice:

  Always read with the dark falling over your left shoulder

  —seen you

  calculate volume of blocks required

  inspect the glazing

  pay the week’s wages

  blueprints scrolled under arm

  treading home over snow

  driven virgin then cow-pied

  five o’clock’s blue eyeballs

  strung open day after day

  a few seconds longer

  an ascendant planet

  following in your footprints possibly

  1999

  OCTOBRISH

  —it is to have these dreams

  still married/where

  you tell me In those days

  instead of working

  I was playing on the shore with a wolf

  coming to a changed

  house/you

  glad of the changes

  but still almost

  transparent

  and bound to disappear

  A life thrashes/half unlived/its passions

  don’t desist/displaced from their own habitat

  like other life-forms take up other dwellings

  so in my body’s head

  so in the stormy spaces

  that life

  leads itself which could not be led

  1999

  SECOND SIGHT

  1

  Tonight I could write many verses

  beginningLet this not happen

  for a woman leaning over a thirtieth story railing

  in hot Julyworn webbed-plastic

  chairs aglare on the nickel-colored balcony

  foreseeing in tracked patterns

  of a project landscape

  the hammer brought

  down by one child upon another’s skull

  Not moved yetsheand hers

  her child insidegazing

  at a screen

  and she a reader oncenow a woman foreseeing

  elbows sore with the weight

  she has placed on them

  a woman on a balcony with a child inside

  gazing at a screen

  2

  A womanneither architect nor engineerconstrues the dustmotes

  of a space primed for neglect

  Indoor, outdoor exhausted air

  Paths that have failed as pathstrees

  that have failed as trees

  Practiced in urban literacy she

  traverses and assesses streets and bridges

  tilting the cumbrous ornamental sewer lids ajar

  in search of reasons underground

  which there why this must be

  1999–2000

  GRATING

  I

  Not having worn

  the pearly choker

  of innocence around my throat

  willed by a woman

  whose leavings I can’t afford

  Not having curled up like that girl

  in maternal gauze

  Not

  having in great joy gazing

  on another woman’s thick fur

  believed I was unsexed for that

  Now let me not

  younot Ibut who ought to be

  hang like a leaf twisting

  endlessly toward the past

  nor reach for a woman’s skinned-off mask

  to hide behind

  You

  not I but who ought to be

  get me out of this, human

  through some

  air vent, grating

  II

  There’s a place where beauty names itself:

  “I am beauty,” and becomes irreproachable

  to the girl transfixed beside the mother

  the artist and her mother

  There must be a color for the mother’s

  Othernessmust be some gate of chalk some slit or stain

  through which the daughter sees outside that otherness

  Long ago must have been burnt a bunch of rags

  still smelling of umbrage

  that can be crushed into a color

  there must be such a color

  if, lying full length

  on the studio floor

  the artist were to paint herself

  in monochrome

  from a mirror in the ceiling

  an elongated figure suspended across the room

  first horizontal

  then straight up and naked

  free of beauty

  ordinary in fact

  III

  The task is to row a strong-boned, legally blind

  hundred-and-one-year-old woman

  across the Yangtze River

  An emergency or not, depending

  Others will have settled her in the boat with pillows but the arms

  wielding the oars will be yours

  crepitus of the shoulders yours

  the conversation still hers

  Three days’ labor

  with you … that was torture

  —to pilot through current and countercurrent

  requiring silence and concentration

  There is a dreadfulness that charm o’erlies

  —as might have been said

  in an older diction

  Try to row deadweight someone without

  death skills

  Shouldering the river a pilot figures

  how

  The great rock shoulders overlook

  in their immensity all decisions

  1999–2000

  NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS

  Late night on the undersidea spectral glare

  abnormalEverything below

  must and will betray itself

  as a floodlit truckstop out here

  on the North American continent stands revealed

  and we’re glad because it’s late evening and no town

  but this, diesel, regular, soda, coffee, chips, beer and video

  no government no laws but LIGHT in the continental dark

  and thenand thenwhat smallness the soul endures

  rolling out on the ramp from such an isle

  onto the harborless Usonian plateau

  Dear Strangercan I raise a poem

  to justiceyou not here

  with your sheet-lightning apprehension

  of nocturne

  your surveyor’s eye for distance

  as if any forest’s fallen tree were for you

  a possible hypotenuse

  Can I wake as I once woke with no thought of you

  into the bad light of a futureless motel

  This thing I am calling justice:

  I could slide my hands into your leather gloves

  but my feet would not fit into your boots

  Every art
leans on some other:yours

  on mine in spasm retching

  last shreds of vanity

  We swayed together like cripples when the wind

  suddenly turned a corneror was it we who turned

  Once more I invite you into this

  in retrospect it will be clear

  1999

  IF YOUR NAME IS ON THE LIST

  If your name is on the list of judges

  you’re one of them

  though you fought their hardening

  assumptionswent and stood

  alone by the window while they

  concurred

  It wasn’t enough to hold your singular

  minority opinion

  You had to face the three bridges

  down the river

  your old ambitions

  flamboyant in bloodstained mist

  You had to carry off under arm

  and write up in perfect loneliness

  your soul-splitting dissent

  Yes, I know a soul can be partitioned like a country

  In all the new inhere old judgments

  loyalties crumbling send up sparks and smoke

  We want to be part of the futuredragging in

  what pure futurity can’t use

  Suddenly a narrow street a little beach a little century

  screamsDon’t let me go

  Don’t let me dieDo you forget

  what we were to each other

 

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