Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 60

by Adrienne Rich


  To be so bruised:in the soft organsskeins of consciousness

  Over and over have let it be

  damage to otherscrushing of the animate core

  that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world

  so bruised:heartspleenlong inflamed ribbons of the guts

  the spine’s vertical necklace swaying

  Have let it swarm

  through uslet it happen

  as it must, inmost

  but before this:long before thisthose other eyes

  frontally exposed themselves and spoke

  2001

  TELL ME

  1

  Tell me, why way toward dawn the body

  close to a body familiar as itself

  chills—tell me, is this the hour

  remembered if outlived

  as freezing—no, don’t tell me

  Dreams spiral birdwinged overhead

  a peculiar hourthe silver mirror-frame’s

  quick laugh the caught light-lattice on the wall

  as a truck drives off before dawn

  headlights on

  Not wanting

  to write this upfor the publicnot wanting

  to write it downin secret

  just to lie here in this cold story

  feeling ittrying to feel it through

  2

  Blink and smoke, flicking with absent nail

  at the mica bar

  where she refills without asking

  Crouch into your raingarbthis will be a night

  unauthorized shock troops are abroad

  this will be a night

  the face-ghosts lean

  over the banister

  declaring the old stories all

  froze like beards or frozen margaritas

  all the new stories taste of lukewarm

  margaritas, lukewarm kisses

  3

  From whence I draw this:harrowed in defeats of language

  in history to my barest marrow

  This:one syllable then another

  gropes upward

  one stroke laid on another

  sound from one throat then another

  never in the making

  making beauty or sense

  always mis-taken, draft, roughed-in

  only to be struck out

  is blurt is roughed-up

  hotkeeps body

  in leaden hour

  simmering

  2001

  FOR JUNE, IN THE YEAR 2001

  The world’s quiver and shine

  I’d clasp for you forever

  jetty vanishing into pearlwhite mist

  western sunstruck water-light

  Touch food to the lips

  let taste never betray you

  cinnamon vanilla melting

  on apple tart

  but what you really craved:

  a potency of words

  Driving back from Berkeley

  880’s brute dystopia

  I was at war with words

  Later on C-SPAN:Tallahassee:

  words straight to the point:

  One person, one vote

  No justice, no peace

  it could lift you by the hair

  it could move you like a wind

  it could take you by surprise

  as sudden Canada geese

  took us by the marina

  poised necks and alert

  attitudes of pause

  Almost home I wanted

  you to smell the budding acacias

  tangled with eucalyptus

  on the road to Santa Cruz

  2002

  THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS

  Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.

  1

  Teaching the first lesson and the last

  —great falling light of summer will you last

  longer than schooltime?

  When children flow

  in columns at the doors

  BOYS GIRLS and the busy teachers

  open or close high windows

  with hooked poles drawing darkgreen shades

  closets unlocked, locked

  questions unasked, asked, when

  love of the fresh impeccable

  sharp-pencilled yes

  order without cruelty

  a street on earthneither heaven nor hell

  busy with commerce and worship

  young teachers walking to school

  fresh bread and early-open foodstalls

  2

  When the offensive rocks the sky when nightglare

  misconstrues day and night when lived-in

  rooms from the upper city

  tumble cratering lower streets

  cornices of olden ornamenthuman debris

  when fear vacuums out the streets

  When the whole town flinches

  blood on the undersole thickening to glass

  Whoever crosseshunchedknees benta contested zone

  knows why she does this suicidal thing

  School’s now in session day and night

  children sleep

  in the classroomsteachers rolled close

  3

  How the good teacher loved

  his schoolthe students

  the lunchroom with fresh sandwiches

  lemonade and milk

  the classroomglass cages

  of moss and turtles

  teaching responsibility

  A morning breaks without bread or fresh-poured milk

  parents or lesson plans

  diarrhea first question of the day

  children shiveringit’s September

  Second question: where is my mother?

  4

  One: I don’t know where your mother

  isTwo: I don’t know

  why they are trying to hurt us

  Three: or the latitude and longitude

  of their hatredFour: I don’t know if we

  hate them as muchI think there’s more toilet paper

  in the supply closetI’m going to break it open

  Today this is your lesson:

  write as clearly as you can

  your namehome streetand number

  down on this page

  No you can’t go home yet

  but you aren’t lost

  this is our school

  I’m not sure what we’ll eat

  we’ll look for healthy roots and greens

  searching for water though the pipes are broken

  5

  There’s a young cat sticking

  her head through window bars

  she’s hungry like us

  but can feed on mice

  her bronze erupting fur

  speaks of a life already wild

  her golden eyes

  don’t give quarterShe’ll teach usLet’s call her

  Sister

  when we get milk we’ll give her some

  6

  I’ve told you, let’s try to sleep in this funny camp

  All night pitiless pilotless things go shrieking

  above us to somewhere

  Don’t let your faces turn to stone

  Don’t stop asking me why

  Let’s pay attention to our catshe needs us

  Maybe tomorrow the bakers can fix their ovens

  7

  “We sang them to napstold storiesmade

  shadow-animals with our hands

  wiped human debris off boots and coats

  sat learning by heart the names

  some were too young to write

  some had forgotten how”

  2001

  THIS EVENING LET’S

  not talk

  about my countryHow

  I’m from an optimistic culture

  that speaks louder than my passport

  Don’t double-agent-contra my

  invincible innocenceI’ve

  got my own

  suspicionsLet’s
>
  order retsina

  cracked olives and bread

  I’ve got questions of my own but

  let’s give a little

  let’s let a little be

  If friendship is not a tragedy

  if it’s a mercy

  we can be merciful

  if it’s just escape

  we’re neither of us running

  why otherwise be here

  Too many reasons not

  to waste a rainy evening

  in a backroom of bouzouki

  and kitchen Greek

  I’ve got questions of my own but

  let’s let it be a little

  There’s a beat in my head

  song of my country

  called Happiness, U.S.A.

  Drowns out bouzouki

  drowns out world and fusion

  with its Get—get—get

  into your happiness before

  happiness pulls away

  hangs a left along the piney shore

  weaves a hand at you—“one I adore”—

  Don’t be proud, run hard for that

  enchantment boat

  tear up the shore if you must but

  get into your happiness because

  before

  and otherwise

  it’s going to pull away

  So tell me later

  what I know already

  and what I don’t get

  yetsave for another day

  Tell me this time

  what you are going through

  travelling the Metropolitan

  Express

  break out of that style

  give me your smile

  awhile

  2001

  VARIATIONS ON LINES FROM A CANADIAN POET

  I needed a genre for the times I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence. I needed a genre to pry loose Liberty from an impacted marriage with the soil. I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress’ complicity. . . .

  —Lisa Robertson, XEclogue (1993)

  I need a gloss for the silence implicit in my legacy

  for phantom Liberty standing bridal at my harbor

  I need a gauze to slow the hemorrhaging of my history

  I need an ancestor complicit in my undercover prying

  I need soil that whirls and spirals upward somewhere else

  I need dustbowl, sand dune, dustdevils for roots

  I need the border-crossing eye of a tornado

  I need an ancestor fleeing into Canada

  to rampage freedom there or keep on fleeing

  to keep on fleeing or invent a genre

  to distemper ideology

  2002

  DELIVERED CLEAN

  You’ve got to separate what they signify from what

  they aredistinguish

  their claimed intentions from the stuff coming

  out from their hands and headsThe professor of cultural dynamics

  taught us thisThey’re disastersin absentia

  reallywhen supposedly working

  Look at the record:

  lost their minds wrote bad checks and smoked in bed

  and if they were men were bad with women and if they were women

  picked men like that or would go with women

  and talked too much and burnt the toast and abused all

  known substancesAnyone who says

  they were generous to a fault putting change

  in whoever’s cup if they had it on themalways room for the friend

  with no place to sleeprefused to make what they made

  in the image of the going thing

  cooked up stews that could keep you alive with

  gizzards and onions and splashes of raw

  red winewere

  loyal where they loved and wouldn’t name names

  should remembersaid the professor of cultural

  dynamicswhat

  messes they made

  The building will be delivered vacant

  of street actorsso-called artists in residence

  fast-order cooks on minimum wage

  who dreamed up a life where space was cheap

  muralists doubling as rabble-rousers

  cross-dressing pavement poets

  delivered clean

  of those who harbor feral cats illegals illicit ideas

  selling their blood to buy old vinyls

  living at night and sleeping by day

  with huge green plants in their windows

  and huge eyes painted on their doors.

  For Jack Foley

  2002

  THE EYE

  A balcony, violet shade on stuccofruit in a plastic bowl on the iron

  raggedy legged table, grapes and sliced melon, saucers, a knife, wine

  in a couple of thick short tumblers cream cheese once came in: our snack

  in the eye of the warThere are places where fruit is implausible, even

  rest is implausible, places where wine if any should be poured into wounds

  but we’re not yet there or it’s not here yetit’s the war

  not us, that moves, pauses and hurtles forward into the neck

  and groin of the city, the soft indefensible places but not here yet

  Behind the balcony an apartment, papers, pillows, green vines still watered

  there are waterless places but not here yet, there’s a bureau topped

  with marble

  and combs and brushes on it, little tubes for lips and eyebrows, a dish

  of coins and keys

  there’s a bed a desk a stove a cane rocker a bookcase civilization

  cage with a skittery bird, there are birdless places but not

  here yet, this bird must creak and flutter in the name of all

  uprooted orchards, limbless groves

  this bird standing for wings and song that here can’t fly

  Our bed quiltedwine pouredfuture uncertainyou’d think

  people like us would have it scanned and plannedtickets to somewhere

  would be in the drawerwith all our education you’d think we’d

  have taken measures

  soon as ash started turning up on the edges of everything ash

  in the leaves of books ash on the leaves of trees and in the veins of

  the passive

  innocent life we were leading calling it hope

  you’d think that and we thought thisit’s the war not us that’s moving

  like shade on a balcony

  2002

  THERE IS NO ONE STORY AND ONE STORY ONLY

  The engineer’s story of hauling coal

  to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs

  between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete

  back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows

  in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years

  The flight attendant’s story murmured

  to the flight steward in the dark galley

  of her fifth-month loss of nerve

  about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen

  The story of the forensic medical team’s

  small plane landing on an Alaska icefield

  of the body in the bag they had to drag

  over the ice like the whole life of that body

  The story of the man driving

  600 miles to be with a friend in another countryseeming

  easy when leaving but afterward

  writing in a letter difficult truths

  Of the friend watching him leave remembering

  the story of her body

  with his once and the stories of their children

  made with other people and how his mind went on

  pressing hers like a body

  There is the story of the mind’s

  temperature neither cold nor celibate

  ArdentThe story of

  not one thing only.

 
; 2002

  II

  USonian Journals 2000

  [Usionian: the term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired architecture. Here, of the United States of North America.]

  Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare

  A country I was born and lived in undergoes rapid and flagrant change. I return here as a stranger. In fact I’ve lived here all along. At a certain point I realized I was no longer connected along any continuous strand to the nature of the change. I can’t find my passport. Nobody asks me to show it.

  Day/Job/Mare

  … to lunch with K., USonian but recently from a British university. Described as “our Marxist.” Dark and pretty, already she’s got half the department classified: She’s crazy … He’s carrying the chip of race on his shoulder … she’s here because he is, isn’t she? … He’s not likely to make it through … Ask her about current Brit. labor scene; she talks about the influence of the industrial revolution on Victorian prose. My aim: get clear of this, find another day job.

  As we left the dark publike restaurant the street—ordinary enough couple of blocks between a parking lot and an office complex—broke into spitting, popping sounds and sudden running. I held back against the wall, she beside me. Something happened then everything. A man’s voice screamed, then whined: a police siren starting up seemed miles away but then right there. I didn’t see any blood. We ran in different directions, she toward, I away from, the police.

 

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