Later Poems Selected and New

by Adrienne Rich

  detail not on TV

  the fingers of the policewoman

  searching the cunt of the young prostitute

  it sees

  the roaches dropping into the pan

  where they cook the pork

  in the House of D

  it sees

  the violence

  embedded in silence

  This eye

  is not for weeping

  its vision

  must be unblurred

  though tears are on my face

  its intent is clarity

  it must forget

  nothing

  September 1971

  Diving into the Wreck

  First having read the book of myths,

  and loaded the camera,

  and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

  I put on

  the body-armor of black rubber

  the absurd flippers

  the grave and awkward mask.

  I am having to do this

  not like Cousteau with his

  assiduous team

  aboard the sun-flooded schooner

  but here alone.

  There is a ladder.

  The ladder is always there

  hanging innocently

  close to the side of the schooner.

  We know what it is for,

  we who have used it.

  Otherwise

  it’s a piece of maritime floss

  some sundry equipment.

  I go down.

  Rung after rung and still

  the oxygen immerses me

  the blue light

  the clear atoms

  of our human air.

  I go down.

  My flippers cripple me,

  I crawl like an insect down the ladder

  and there is no one

  to tell me when the ocean

  will begin.

  First the air is blue and then

  it is bluer and then green and then

  black I am blacking out and yet

  my mask is powerful

  it pumps my blood with power

  the sea is another story

  the sea is not a question of power

  I have to learn alone

  to turn my body without force

  in the deep element.

  And now: it is easy to forget

  what I came for

  among so many who have always

  lived here

  swaying their crenellated fans

  between the reefs

  and besides

  you breathe differently down here.

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  I came to see the damage that was done

  and the treasures that prevail.

  I stroke the beam of my lamp

  slowly along the flank

  of something more permanent

  than fish or weed

  the thing I came for:

  the wreck and not the story of the wreck

  the thing itself and not the myth

  the drowned face always staring

  toward the sun

  the evidence of damage

  worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

  the ribs of the disaster

  curving their assertion

  among the tentative haunters.

  This is the place.

  And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

  streams black, the merman in his armored body

  We circle silently

  about the wreck

  we dive into the hold.

  I am she: I am he

  whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

  whose breasts still bear the stress

  whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

  obscurely inside barrels

  half-wedged and left to rot

  we are the half-destroyed instruments

  that once held to a course

  the water-eaten log

  the fouled compass

  We are, I am, you are

  by cowardice or courage

  the one who find our way

  back to this scene

  carrying a knife, a camera

  a book of myths

  in which

  our names do not appear.

  1972

  The Phenomenology of Anger

  1. The freedom of the wholly mad

  to smear & play with her madness

  write with her fingers dipped in it

  the length of a room

  which is not, of course, the freedom

  you have, walking on Broadway

  to stop & turn back or go on

  10 blocks; 20 blocks

  but feels enviable maybe

  to the compromised

  curled in the placenta of the real

  which was to feed & which is strangling her.

  2. Trying to light a log that’s lain in the damp

  as long as this house has stood:

  even with dry sticks I can’t get started

  even with thorns.

  I twist last year into a knot of old headlines

  —this rose won’t bloom.

  How does a pile of rags the machinist wiped his hands on

  feel in its cupboard, hour upon hour?

  Each day during the heat-wave

  they took the temperature of the haymow.

  I huddled fugitive

  in the warm sweet simmer of the hay

  muttering: Come.

  3. Flat heartland of winter.

  The moonmen come back from the moon

  the firemen come out of the fire.

  Time without a taste: time without decisions.

  Self-hatred, a monotone in the mind.

  The shallowness of a life lived in exile

  even in the hot countries.

  Cleaver, staring into a window full of knives.

  4. White light splits the room.

  Table. Window. Lampshade. You.

  My hands, sticky in a new way.

  Menstrual blood

  seeming to leak from your side.

  Will the judges try to tell me

  which was the blood of whom?

  5. Madness. Suicide. Murder.

  Is there no way out but these?

  The enemy, always just out of sight

  snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded

  in a snowy blur, abominable snowman

  —at once the most destructive

  and the most elusive being

  gunning down the babies at My Lai

  vanishing in the face of confrontation.

  The prince of air and darkness

  computing body counts, masturbating

  in the factory

  of facts.

  6. Fantasies of murder: not enough:

  to kill is to cut off from pain

  but the killer goes on hurting

  Not enough. When I dream of meeting

  the enemy, this is my dream:

  white acetylene

  ripples from my body

  effortlessly released

  perfectly trained

  on the true enemy

  raking his body down to the thread

  of existence

  burning away his lie

  leaving him in a new

  world; a changed

  man

  7. I suddenly see the world

  as no longer viable:

  you are out there burning the crops

  with some new sublimate

  This morning you left the bed

  we still share

  and went out to spread impotence

  upon the world

  I hate you.

  I hate the mask you wear, your eyes

  assuming a depth

  they do not possess, drawing me

  into the grotto of your skull

  the l
andscape of bone

  I hate your words

  they make me think of fake

  revolutionary bills

  crisp imitation parchment

  they sell at battlefields.

  Last night, in this room, weeping

  I asked you: what are you feeling?

  do you feel anything?

  Now in the torsion of your body

  as you defoliate the fields we lived from

  I have your answer.

  8. Dogeared earth. Wormeaten moon.

  A pale cross-hatching of silver

  lies like a wire screen on the black

  water. All these phenomena

  are temporary.

  I would have loved to live in a world

  of women and men gaily

  in collusion with green leaves, stalks,

  building mineral cities, transparent domes,

  little huts of woven grass

  each with its own pattern—

  a conspiracy to coexist

  with the Crab Nebula, the exploding

  universe, the Mind—

  9. “The only real love I have ever felt

  was for children and other women.

  Everything else was lust, pity,

  self-hatred, pity, lust.”

  This is a woman’s confession.

  Now, look again at the face

  of Botticelli’s Venus, Kali,

  the Judith of Chartres

  with her so-called smile.

  10. how we are burning up our lives

  testimony:

  the subway

  hurtling to Brooklyn

  her head on her knees

  asleep or drugged

  la vía del tren subterráneo

  es peligrosa

  many sleep

  the whole way

  others sit

  staring holes of fire into the air

  others plan rebellion:

  night after night

  awake in prison, my mind

  licked at the mattress like a flame

  till the cellblock went up roaring

  Thoreau setting fire to the woods

  Every act of becoming conscious

  (it says here in this book)

  is an unnatural act

  1972

  For a Sister

  (Natalya Gorbanevskaya, two years incarcerated in a Soviet penal mental asylum for her political activism; and others

  I trust none of them. Only my existence

  thrown out in the world like a towchain

  battered and twisted in many chance connections,

  being pulled this way, pulling in that.

  I have to steal the sense of dust on your floor,

  milk souring in your pantry

  after they came and took you.

  I’m forced to guess at the look you threw backward.

  A few paragraphs in the papers,

  allowing for printers’ errors, wilful omissions,

  the trained violence of doctors.

  I don’t trust them, but I’m learning how to use them.

  Little by little out of the blurred conjectures

  your face clears, a sunken marble

  slowly cranked up from underwater.

  I feel the ropes straining under their load of despair.

  They searched you for contraband, they made their notations.

  A look of intelligence could get you twenty years.

  Better to trace nonexistent circles with your finger,

  try to imitate the smile of the permanently dulled.

  My images. This metaphor for what happens.

  A geranium in flames on a green cloth

  becomes yours. You, coming home after years

  to light the stove, get out the typewriter and begin again. Your story.

  1972

  For the Dead

  I dreamed I called you on the telephone

  to say: Be kinder to yourself

  but you were sick and would not answer

  The waste of my love goes on this way

  trying to save you from yourself

  I have always wondered about the leftover

  energy, water rushing down a hill

  long after the rains have stopped

  or the fire you want to go to bed from

  but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down

  the red coals more extreme, more curious

  in their flashing and dying

  than you wish they were

  sitting there long after midnight

  1972

  Meditations for a Savage Child

  (The prose passages are from J-M Itard’s account of The Wild Boy of Aveyron, as translated by G. and M. Humphrey)

  I

  There was a profound indifference to the objects of our pleasures and of our fictitious needs; there was still . . . so intense a passion for the freedom of the fields . . . that he would certainly have escaped into the forest had not the most rigid precautions been taken . . .

  In their own way, by their own lights

  they tried to care for you

  tried to teach you to care

  for objects of their caring:

  glossed oak planks, glass

  whirled in a fire

  to impossible thinness

  to teach you names

  for things

  you did not need

  muslin shirred against the sun

  linen on a sack of feathers

  locks, keys

  boxes with coins inside

  they tried to make you feel

  the importance of

  a piece of cowhide

  sewn around a bundle

  of leaves impressed with signs

  to teach you language:

  the thread their lives

  were strung on

  II

  When considered from a more general and philosophic point of view, these scars bear witness . . . against the feebleness and insufficiency of man when left entirely to himself, and in favor of the resources of nature which . . . work openly to repair and conserve that which she tends secretly to impair and destroy.

  I keep thinking about the lesson of the human ear

  which stands for music, which stands for balance—

  or the cat’s ear which I can study better

  the whorls and ridges exposed

  It seems a hint dropped about the inside of the skull

  which I cannot see

  lobe, zone, that part of the brain

  which is pure survival

  The most primitive part

  I go back into at night

  pushing the leathern curtain

  with naked fingers

  then

  with naked body

  There where every wound is registered

  as scar tissue

  A cave of scars!

  ancient, archaic wallpaper

  built up, layer on layer

  from the earliest, dream-white

  to yesterday’s, a red-black scrawl

  a red mouth slowly closing

  Go back so far there is another language

  go back far enough the language

  is no longer personal

  these scars bear witness

  but whether to repair

  or to destruction

  I no longer know

  III

  It is true that there is visible on the throat a very extended scar which might throw some doubt upon the soundness of the underlying parts if one were not reassured by the appearance of the scar . . .

  When I try to speak

  my throat is cut

  and, it seems, by his hand

  The sounds I make are prehuman, radical

  the telephone is always

  ripped-out

  and he sleeps on

  Yet always the tissue

  grows over, white as silk

  hardly a blemish

  maybe a hieroglyph for
scream

  Child, no wonder you never wholly

  trusted your keepers

  IV

  A hand with the will rather than the habit of crime had wished to make an attempt on the life of this child . . . left for dead in the woods, he will have owed the prompt recovery of his wound to the help of nature alone.

  In the 18th century infanticide

  reaches epidemic proportions:

  old prints attest to it: starving mothers

  smothering babies in sleep

  abandoning newborns in sleet

  on the poorhouse steps

  gin-blurred, setting fire to the room

  I keep thinking of the flights we used to take

  on the grapevine across the gully

  littered with beer-bottles where dragonflies flashed

  we were 10, 11 years old

  wild little girls with boyish bodies

  flying over the moist

  shadow-mottled earth

  till they warned us to stay away from there

  Later they pointed out

  the venetian blinds

  of the abortionist’s house

  we shivered

  Men can do things to you

  was all they said

  V

  And finally, my Lord, looking at this long experiment . . . whether it be considered as the methodical education of a savage or as no more than the physical and moral treatment of one of those creatures ill-favored by nature, rejected by society and abandoned by medicine, the care that has been taken and ought still to be taken of him, the changes that have taken place, and those that can be hoped for, the voice of humanity, the interest inspired by such a desertion and a destiny so strange—all these things recommend this extraordinary young man to the attention of scientists, to the solicitude of administrators, and to the protection of the government.

  1. The doctor in “Uncle Vanya”:

  They will call us fools,

  blind, ignorant, they will

  despise us

  devourers of the forest

  leaving teeth of metal in every tree

  so the tree can neither grow

  nor be cut for lumber

  Does the primeval forest

  weep

  for its devourers

  does nature mourn

  our existence

  is the child with arms

  burnt to the flesh of its sides

  weeping eyelessly for man

  2. At the end of the distinguished doctor’s

  lecture

  a young woman raises her hand:

  You have the power

  in your hands, you control our lives—

  why do you want our pity too?

  Why are men afraid

  why do you pity yourselves

  why do the administrators

  lack solicitude, the government

  refuse protection,

  why should the wild child

  weep for the scientists

  why

  The Dream of a

  Common Language