Collected Poems

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Collected Poems Page 62

by Adrienne Rich


  talkingyou smokinglight and shade

  on the deck, here in California

  our laughter, your questions of translation

  your daughter’s flute?

  2002–2003

  RITUAL ACTS

  i

  We are asking for books

  No, not—but a list of books

  to be given to young people

  Well, to young poets

  to guide them in their work

  He gestures impatiently

  They won’t read he says

  My time is precious

  If they want to they’ll find

  whatever they need

  I’m going for a walk after lunch

  After that I lie down

  Then and only then do I read the papers

  Mornings are for work

  the proofs of the second volume

  —my trilogy, and he nods

  And we too nod recognition

  ii

  The buses—packed

  since the subways are forbidden

  and the highways forsaken

  so people bring everything on—

  what they can’t do without—

  Air conditioners, sculpture

  Double baskets of babies

  Fruit platters, crematory urns

  Sacks of laundry, of books

  Inflated hearts, bass fiddles

  Bridal gowns in plastic bags

  Pet iguanas, oxygen tanks

  The tablets of Moses

  iii

  After all—to have loved, wasn’t that the object?

  Love is the only thing in life

  but then you can love too much

  or the wrong way, you lose

  yourself or you lose

  the person

  or you strangle each other

  Maybe the object of love is

  to have loved

  greatly

  at one time or another

  Like a cinema trailer

  watched long ago

  iv

  You need to turn yourself around

  face in another direction

  She wrapped herself in a flag

  soaked it in gasoline and lit a match

  This is for the murdered babies

  they say she said

  Others heard

  for the honor of my country

  Others remember

  the smell and how she screamed

  Others say, This was just theater

  v

  This will not be a love scene

  but an act between two humans

  Now please let us see you

  tenderly scoop his balls

  into your hand

  You will hold them

  under your face

  There will be tears on your face

  That will be all

  the director said

  We will not see his face

  He wants to do the scene

  but not to show

  his face

  vi

  A goat devouring a flowering plant

  A child squeezing through a fence to school

  A woman slicing an onion

  A bare foot sticking out

  A wash line tied to a torn-up tree

  A dog’s leg lifted at a standpipe

  An old man kneeling to drink there

  A hand on the remote

  We would like to show but to not be obvious

  except to the oblivious

  We want to show ordinary life

  We are dying to show it

  2003

  POINT IN TIME

  If she’s writing a letter on a sheet of mica

  to be left on the shelf of the cave

  with the century’s other letters each

  stained with its own DNA expressed

  in love’s naked dark or the dawn

  of a day of stone:

  it’s a fact like a town crosshaired on a map

  But we are not keeping archives here

  where all can be blown away

  nor raking the graves in Père-Lachaise

  nor is she beholden or dutiful

  as her pen pushes its final stroke

  into the mineral page

  molecule speaking to molecule

  for just this moment

  This is the point in time when

  she must re-condense her purpose

  like ink, like rain, like winter light

  like foolishness and hatred

  like the blood her hand first knew

  as a wet patch on the staircase wall

  she was feeling her way down in the dark.

  2003

  IV

  Alternating Current

  Sometimes I’m back in that city

  in its/not my/autumn

  crossing a white bridge

  over a dun-green river

  eating shellfish with young poets

  under the wrought-iron roof of the great market

  drinking with the dead poet’s friend

  to music struck

  from odd small instruments

  walking arm in arm with the cinematographer

  through the whitelight gardens of Villa Grimaldi

  earth and air stretched

  to splitting still

  his question:

  have you ever been in a place like this?

  •

  No bad dreams.Night, the bed, the faint clockface.

  No bad dreams.Her arm or leg or hair.

  No bad dreams.A wheelchair unit screaming

  off the block.No bad dreams.Pouches of blood: red cells,

  plasma.Not here.No, none.Not yet.

  •

  Take one, take two

  —camera out of focusdelirium swims

  across the lensDon’t get me wrongI’m not

  critiquing your direction

  but I was theresaw what you didn’t

  takethe care

  you didn’tfirst of yourself then

  of the childDon’t get me wrong I’m on

  your side but standing off

  where it rainsnot on the set where it’s

  not raining yet

  take three

  •

  What’s suffered in laughterin aroused afternoons

  in nightly yearlong back-to-back

  wandering each others’ nerves and pulses

  O changing love that doesn’t change

  •

  A deluxe blending machine

  A chair with truth’s coat of arms

  A murderous code of manners

  A silver cocktail reflecting a tiny severed hand

  A small bird stuffed with print and roasted

  A row of Lucite chessmen filled with shaving lotion

  A bloodred valentine to power

  A watered-silk innocence

  A microwaved foie gras

  A dry-ice carrier for conscience donations

  A used set of satin sheets folded to go

  A box at the opera of suffering

  A fellowship at the villa, all expenses

  A Caterpillar’s tracks gashing the environment

  A bad day for students of the environment

  A breakdown of the blending machine

  A rush to put it in order

  A song in the chapel a speech a press release

  •

  As finally by wind or grass

  drive-ins

  where romance always was

  an after-dark phenomenon

  lie crazed and still

  great panoramas lost to air

  this time this site of power shall pass

  and we remain or not but not remain

  as now we think we are

  •

  For J.J.

  When we are shaken out

  when we are shaken out to the last vestige

  when history is done with us

  when our late grains glitte
r

  salt swept into shadow

  indignant and importunate strife-fractured crystals

  will it matter if our tenderness (our solidarity)

  abides in residue

  long as there’s tenderness and solidarity

  Could the tempos and attunements of my voice

  in a poem or yoursor yours and mine

  in telephonic high hilarity

  cresting above some stupefied inanity

  be more than personal

  (and—as you once said—what’s wrong with that?)

  2002–2003

  V

  If some long unborn friend

  looks at photos in pity,

  we say, sure we were happy,

  but it was not in the wind.

  MEMORIZE THIS

  i

  Love for twenty-six years, you can’t stop

  A withered petunia’s crispthe bud stickyboth are dark

  The flower engulfed in its own purpleSo common, nothing

  like it

  The old woodstove gone to the dump

  Sun plunges through the new skylight

  This morning’s clouds piled like autumn in Massachusetts

  This afternoon’s far-flung like the Mojave

  Night melts one body into another

  One drives fast the other maps a route

  Thought new it becomes familiar

  From thirteen years back maybe

  One oils the hinges one edges the knives

  One loses an earring the other finds it

  One says I’d rather make love

  Than go to the Greek Festival

  The other, I agree.

  ii

  Take a strand of your hair

  on my fingers let it fall

  across the pillowlift to my nostrils

  inhale your body entire

  Sleeping with you after

  weeks aparthow normal

  yetafter midnight

  to turn and slide my arm

  along your thigh

  drawn up in sleep

  what delicate amaze

  2002–2003

  THE PAINTER’S HOUSE

  Nineteen-thirties Midwestern

  —the painter long gone to the sea—

  plutonic sycamore by the shed

  a mailbox open mouthed

  in garden loam a chip

  of veiny chinaturned

  up there where he might have stood

  eyeing the dim lip of grass

  beyond, the spring stars sharpening

  above

  Well since there’s still lightwalk around

  stand on the porch

  cup hands around eyes peering in

  Is this the kitchen where she worked and thought

  Is that the loft where their bodies fell

  into each otherThe nail where the mirror

  hungthe shelf where her college books

  eyed her aslant

  Those stairs would her bare feet have felt?

  In the mute shed no trace

  of masterworksoccult

  fury of pigmentno

  downslash of provocation

  no whirled hands at the doorjamb

  no lightning streakno stab in the dark

  nosexnoface

  2003

  AFTER APOLLINAIRE & BRASSENS

  When the bridge of lovers bends

  over the oilblack river

  and we see our own endings

  through eyes aching and blearing

  when the assault begins

  and we’re thrown apart still longing

  when the Bridge of Arts trembles

  under the streaked sky

  when words of the poets tumble

  into the shuddering stream

  where who knew what joy

  would leap after what pain

  what flows under the Seine

  Mississippi Jordan Tigris

  Elbe Amazon Indus Nile

  and all the tributaries

  who knows where song goes

  now and from whom

  toward what longings

  2003

  SLASHES

  Years passand twowho once

  don’t know each other at all

  dark strokes gouge a white wallas lives

  and customs slashed by dates :October ’17/May ’68

  /September ’73

  Slash across livesmemory pursues its errands

  a lent linen shirt pulled unabashedly over her naked shoulders

  cardamom seed bitten in her teeth

  watching him chop onions

  words in the airsegregation/partition/apartheid

  vodka/cigarette smokea time

  vertigo on subway stairs

  Years passshe pressing the time into a box

  not to be openeda box

  quelling pleasure and pain

  You could describe something like this

  in gossipwrite a novelget it wrong

  In wolf-tree, see the former field

  The river’s muscle :greater than its length

  the lake’s light-blistered blue :scorning

  circumference

  A map inscribes relation

  only when

  underground aquifers are fathomed in

  water table rising or falling

  beneath apparently

  imperturbable earth

  music from a basement session overheard

  2002

  TRACE ELEMENTS

  Back to the shallow pondsharp rotting scatter

  leaf-skinned edge therewhere the ring

  couldn’t be sunk far out enough

  (far enough from shore)

  back out the rock-toothed logging road

  to the dark brook where it’s droppedmudsucked gold

  (sucked under stones)

  that’s another marriagelucid and decisive

  to say at last:I did, I do, I will

  (I did not, I will not)

  Snow-whirled streetlamps under a window

  (a bedroom and a window)

  icy inch of the raised sashblizzard clearing to calm

  outlined furniture:figured mirror:bedded bodies:

  warm blood:eyes in the dark:

  no contradiction:

  She was there

  and they were there:her onlynowseeing it(only now)

  Bow season:then gun season

  Apricot leaves bloodsprinkled:soaked: case closed

  Memory:echo in time

  All’s widescreen nowlurid inchoate century

  Vast disappearing actsthe greatest show on earth

  but here are small clear refractions

  from an unclear season

  blood on a leaf

  gold trace element in water

  light from the eye behind the eye

  2003

  BRACT

  Stories of three islands

  you’ve told me, over years

  over meals, after quarrels,

  light changing the spectrum of your hair

  your green eyes, lying on our backs

  naked or clothed, driving

  through wind, eighteen-wheeler trucks

  of produce crates ahead and behind

  you saying, I couldn’t live long

  far from the ocean

  Spring of new and continuing

  war, harpsichord crashing

  under Verlet’s fingers

  I tell you I could not live long

  far from your anger

  lunar reefed and tidal

  bloodred bract from spiked stem

  tossing on the ocean

  2003

  VI

  Dislocations:

  Seven Scenarios

  1

  Still learning the word

  “home”or what it could mean

  say, to relinquish

  a backdrop of Japanese maples turning

  color of rusted wheelbarrow bottom


  where the dahlia tubers were thrown

  You must go live in the city now

  over the subway though not on

  its grating

  must endure the foreign music

  of the block party

  finger in useless anger

  the dangling cords of the window blind

  2

  In a vast dystopic space the small things

  multiply

  when all the pills run out the pain

  grows more general

  flies find the many eyes

  quarrels thicken then

  weaken

  tiny mandibles of rumor open and close

  blame has a name that will not be spoken

  you grasp or share a clot of food

  according to your nature

  or your strength

  love’s ferocity snarls

  from under the drenched blanket’s hood

  3

  City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker

  whatever it can

  casual salutations first

  little rivulets of thought

  then wanting stronger stuff

  sucks at the marrow of selves

  the nurse’s long knowledge of wounds

  the rabbi’s scroll of ethics

  the young worker’s defiance

  only the solipsist seems intact

  in her prewar building

 

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