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Collected Poems

Page 59

by Adrienne Rich


  1999

  1999

  Before the acute

  point of the severing

  I wanted to see into my century’s

  hinged and beveled mirror

  clear of smoke

  eyes of coal and ruby

  stunned neck the carrier of bricks and diamonds

  brow of moonlit oyster shells

  barbed wire lacework disgracing

  the famous monument

  Behind it spread the old

  indigenous maplandscape

  before conquerorshorizon ownless

  TERZA RIMA

  1

  Hail-spurting skysun

  splashing off persimmons left

  in the quit garden

  of the quit houseThe realtor’s swaying name

  against this cloudheap this

  surrendered acre

  I wouldso help metell you if I could

  how some great teacher

  came to my side and said:

  Let’s go downinto the underworld

  —the earth already crazed

  Let me take your hand

  —but who would that be?

  already trembling on the broken crust

  who would I trust?

  I become the default derailed memory-raided

  limping

  teacher I never hadI lead andI follow

  2

  Call it the earthquake trail:

  I lead through live-oak meadows

  to the hillsidewhere the plates shuddered

  rewind the seismic story

  point to the sundered

  fence of 1906the unmatching rocks

  trace the loop under dark bay branches

  blurred with moss

  behaving like a guide

  Like a novice I lag

  behind with the little snake

  dead on the beaten path

  This will never happen again

  3

  At the end of the beaten path we’re sold free

  tickets for the celebration

  of the death of history

  The last page of the calendar

  will go upa sheet of flame

  (no one will be permitted on the bridge)

  We’ll assemble by letters

  alphabetical

  each ticket a letter

  to view ourselves as giants

  on screen-surround

  in the parking lot

  figures of men and women firmly pushing

  babies in thickly padded prams

  through disintegrating malls

  into the new era

  4

  I have lost our waythe fault is mine

  oursthe fault belongs

  to usI becomethe guide

  who should have defaulted

  who should have remained the novice

  Ias guidefailed

  I as novicetrembled

  I should have been strongerheld us

  together

  5

  I thought I was

  strongermy will the ice-sail

  speeding my runners

  along frozen rivers

  bloodied by sunset

  thought I could be forever

  will-fulmy sail filled

  with perfect ozonemy blades

  flashing clean into the ice

  6

  Was that youth?that clear

  sapphire on snow

  a distinct hour

  in Central Parkthat smell

  on sidewalk and windowsill

  fresh and unmixt

  the blizzard’s peace and drama

  over the city

  a public privacy

  waiting

  in the small steamed-up copy shop

  slush tracked in across a wooden floor

  then shiveringelated

  in twilight

  at the bus stopwith othersa public happiness

  7

  Not simple is it to do

  a guide’s workthe novices

  irrupting hourly with their own bad vigor

  knowing not who they are

  every phase of moon an excuse

  for fibrillating

  besides the needin today’s world

  to consider

  outreachthe new thinking

  —Or: love will strongly move you

  or commerce will

  You want a priest?go to the altar

  where eternal bargains are struck

  want love?

  go down inside your destructible heart

  8

  In Almodóvar’s film

  we go for truth to the prostitutes’ field

  to find past and future

  elegantbeaten-up and knifed

  sex without gender

  preyed-on and preying

  transactionszones of play

  the circling drivers

  in search of their desires

  theater of loveNinth Circle

  there are so many teachers

  hereno fire can shrink them

  Do you understand?you could get your face

  slashed in such a place

  Do you think this is a movie?

  9

  She says: I gave my name and it was taken

  I no longer have my name

  I gave my word and it was broken

  My words are learning

  to walk on crutches

  through traffic

  without stammering

  My name is a prisoner

  who will not name names

  She says:I gave my tongue

  to loveand this

  makes it hard to speak

  She says:When my life depended

  on one of two

  opposite terms

  I dared mix beauty with courage

  they were my lovers

  together they were tortured

  10

  Sick of my own old poemscaught

  on rainshower Fifth Avenue

  in a bookstore

  I reach to a shelf

  and there you arePier Paolo

  speaking to Gramsci’s ashes

  in the old encircling rhyme

  Vivo nel non volere

  del tramontato dopoguerra:

  amando

  il mondo che odio …

  that vernacular voice

  intimately political

  and that was how you died

  so I clasp my book to my heart

  as the shop closes

  11

  Under the blackened dull-metal corners

  of the small espresso pot

  a jet flares blue

  a smell tinctures the room

  —some sniff or prescience of

  a life that actually could be

  liveda grain of hope

  a bite of bitter chocolate in the subway

  to pull on our senses

  without them we’re prey

  to the failed will

  its science of despair

  12

  How I hate it when you ascribe to me

  a “woman’s vision”

  cozy with coffeepotsdrawn curtains

  orleaning in black leather dress

  over your chair

  black fingernail tracing your lines

  overspent Sibyl drifting in a bottle

  How I’ve hated speaking “as a woman”

  for mere continuation

  when the broken is what I saw

  As a womando I love

  and hate?as a woman

  do I munch my bitter chocolate underground?

  Yes.No.You too

  sexed as you arehating

  this whole thingyou keep onit remaking

  13

  Where the novice pulls the guide

  across frozen air

  where the guide suddenly gripsthe shoulder

  of the novicewhere the moss is golden

  the sky sponged with pink at suns
et

  where the urine of reindeer barely vanished

  stings the air like a sharp herb

  where the throat of the clear-cut opens

  across the surrendered forest

  I’m most difficultly

  with youI lead

  and I follow

  our shadowsreindeer-huge

  slip onto the map

  of chance and purposefigures

  on the broken crust

  exchanging placesbites to eat

  a glance

  2000

  FOUR SHORT POEMS

  1

  (driving home from Robin Blaser’s reading)

  The moon

  is not romantic.No.It’s

  a fact of life and still

  we aren’t inured. You would think, it reflects

  the waves not draws them.So

  I’d compel you as I

  have been compelled by you.On the coast road

  between drafts of fog

  that face (and yes, it is

  expressioned) breaking in and out

  doth speak to us

  as he did in his courtliness

  and operatic mystery.

  2

  We’re not yet out of the everglades

  of the last century

  our body parts are still there

  though we would have our minds careen and swoop

  over the new ocean

  with a wild surmise

  the bloody strings

  tangled and stuck between

  become our lyre

  3

  Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand piano

  in a small California town by a boy from Prague

  here for a month to learn American

  This is not “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

  This is one who startles the neighbors with his owning

  of the transmissible heritage one evening

  then for the whole month droops over the Internet.

  4

  From the new crudities, from the old

  apartheid spraying ruin on revolution,

  back to Du Bois of Great Barrington and Africa

  or Kafka of the intransmissible

  tradition

  the stolen secrets in the cleft

  resideand this, beloved poets

  is where our hearts, livers and lights still

  dwell unbeknownst and vital

  For Elizabeth Willis and for Peter Gizzi

  2000

  RAUSCHENBERG’S BED

  How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes

  unsleepable site of anarchyWhat body holes expressed

  their exaltation loathing exhaustion

  what horse of night has pawed those sheets

  what talk under the blanket raveled

  what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion

  what traveler homeward reached for familiar bedding

  and felt stiff tatters under his fingers

  How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical

  inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow

  How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads

  while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing

  Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts

  sometimes eking forth from its laden springs

  pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne

  Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes

  for the nether hole the everywhere

  How the children sleep and wake

  the childrensleep awake upstairs

  How on a single night the driver of roads comes back

  into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer

  leans toward what’s there for warmth

  human limbshuman crust

  2000

  WAITING FOR YOU AT THE MYSTERY SPOT

  I sat down facing the steep place where

  tours clambered upward and others straggled down, the redwoods

  outstanding all

  A family, East Asian, holding a picnic at their van:

  “We are always hungry,” the older sister said laughing, “and we

  always bring our food”

  Roses clambered a rough fence in the slanting sun that speared

  the redwoods

  We’d gone into the gift shop while waiting for your tour

  found Davy Crockett coonskin caps, deerskin coin purses

  scorpions embedded in plastic, MYSTERY SPOT bumper stickers

  and postcards of men you wouldn’t be left alone with

  a moment if you could help it, illustrating

  the Mystery Spot and its tricks with gravity and horizon

  Your tour was called and you started upward.I went back

  to my redwood bench

  “The mystai streamed”

  toward the

  mystery

  But if anything up there was occult

  nothing at ground level was:tiny beings flashing around

  in the sun secure knowing their people were nearby

  grandfathers, aunts, elder brothers or sisters, parents and loved friends

  You could see how it was when each tour was called and gathered itself

  who rode on what shoulders, ran alongside, held hands

  the languages all different, English the least of these

  I sat listening to voices watching the miraculous migration

  of sunshafts through the redwoodsthe great spears folding up

  into letters from the sun deposited through dark green slots

  each one saying

  I love you but

  I must draw awayBelieve, I will return

  Then: happiness! your particular figures

  in the descending crowd:Anne, Jacob, Charlie!

  Anne with her sandals off

  in late day warmth and odor and odd wonder

  2000

  ENDS OF THE EARTH

  All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken

  television set.

  Coarse-frosted karst crumbling as foam, eel eyes piercing the rivers.

  Dark or light, leaving or landfall, male or female demarcations

  dissolve

  into the O of time and solitude. I found here: no inter/

  ruption to a version of earth so abandoned and abandoning

  I read it my own acedia lashed by the winds

  questing shredmeal toward the Great Plains, that ocean. My fear.

  Call it Galisteo but that’s not the name of what happened here.

  If indoors in an eyeflash (perhaps) I caught the gazer of spaces

  lighting the two wax candles in black iron holders

  against the white wall after work and after dark

  but never saw the hand

  how inhale the faint mist of another’s gazing, pacing, dozing

  words muttered aloud in utter silence, gesture unaware

  thought that has suffered and borne itself to the ends of the earth

  web agitating between my life and another’s?

  Other whose bed I have shared but never at once together?

  2000

  THE SCHOOL AMONG

  THE RUINS

  (2000–2004)

  For Jean Valentine

  I

  CENTAUR’S REQUIEM

  Your hooves drawn together underbelly

  shoulders in mudyour mane

  of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you

  your longhaired neck

  eyesjaw yesand ears

  unforgivably human on such a creature

  unforgivably what you are

  deposited in the grit-kicked field of a champion

  tender neck and nostrilsteacherwater-lily suction-spot

  what you weremarvelouswe could not stand

  Night dropsan awaited storm

  driving in to wreck y
our path

  Foam on your hide like flowers

  where you fellor falldesire

  2001

  EQUINOX

  Time split like a fruit between dark and light

  and a usual fog drags

  over this landfall

  I’ve walked September end to end

  barefoot room to room

  carrying in hand a knife well honed for cutting stem or root

  or wickeyes open

  to abalone shellsmemorial candle flames

  split lemonsroses laid

  along charring logsGorgeous things

  : : dull acres of developed land as we had named it:Nowhere

  wetlandburnt garbage looming at its heart

  gunmetal thicketmidnightblue blood and

  tricking masksI thought I knew

  history was not a novel

  So can I say it was not Ilisted as Innocence

  betrayed youserving (and protesting always)

  the motives of my government

  thinking we’d scratch out a place

  where poetryold subversive shape

  grew out of Nowherehere?

  where skin could lie on skin

  a place “outside the limits”

  Can say I was mistaken?

 

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