Later Poems Selected and New

by Adrienne Rich

  centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;

  and we still have to stare into the absence

  of men who would not, women who could not, speak

  to our life—this still unexcavated hole

  called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

  VI

  Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—

  only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands

  I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,

  handling power-tools or steering-wheel

  or touching a human face. . . . Such hands could turn

  the unborn child rightways in the birth canal

  or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship

  through icebergs, or piece together

  the fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup

  bearing on its sides

  figures of ecstatic women striding

  to the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave—

  such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence

  with such restraint, with such a grasp

  of the range and limits of violence

  that violence ever after would be obsolete.

  VII

  What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

  What atonement is this all about?

  —and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.

  Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals,

  that modulated cantata of the wild?

  or, when away from you I try to create you in words,

  am I simply using you, like a river or a war?

  And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars

  to escape writing of the worst thing of all—

  not the crimes of others, not even our own death,

  but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough

  so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem

  mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

  VIII

  I can see myself years back at Sunion,

  hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes

  in woman’s form, limping the long path,

  lying on a headland over the dark sea,

  looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl

  of white told me a wave had struck,

  imagining the pull of that water from that height,

  knowing deliberate suicide wasn’t my métier,

  yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound.

  Well, that’s finished. The woman who cherished

  her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.

  I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,

  but I want to go on from here with you

  fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

  IX

  Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

  I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.

  It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,

  even your face at another age.

  Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—

  a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,

  a key. . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom

  deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,

  this inarticulate life. I’m waiting

  for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water

  for once, and show me what I can do

  for you, who have often made the unnameable

  nameable for others, even for me.

  X

  Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through

  our cries, our murmured dawn conspiracies

  our telephone calls. She knows—what can she know?

  If in my human arrogance I claim to read

  her eyes, I find there only my own animal thoughts:

  that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort,

  that voices of the psyche drive through the flesh

  further than the dense brain could have foretold,

  that the planetary nights are growing cold for those

  on the same journey who want to touch

  one creature-traveler clear to the end;

  that without tenderness, we are in hell.

  XI

  Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes,

  making them eternally and visibly female.

  No height without depth, without a burning core,

  though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava.

  I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain

  smoking within like the sibyl stooped over her tripod,

  I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path,

  to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp,

  never failing to note the small, jewel-like flower

  unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her,

  that clings to the slowly altering rock—

  that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves,

  was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us.

  XII

  Sleeping, turning in turn like planets

  rotating in their midnight meadow:

  a touch is enough to let us know

  we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:

  the dream-ghosts of two worlds

  walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.

  I’ve wakened to your muttered words

  spoken light- or dark-years away

  as if my own voice had spoken.

  But we have different voices, even in sleep,

  and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different

  and the past echoing through our bloodstreams

  is freighted with different language, different meanings—

  though in any chronicle of the world we share

  it could be written with new meaning

  we were two lovers of one gender,

  we were two women of one generation.

  XIII

  The rules break like a thermometer,

  quicksilver spills across the charted systems,

  we’re out in a country that has no language

  no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren

  through gorges unexplored since dawn

  whatever we do together is pure invention

  the maps they gave us were out of date

  by years . . . we’re driving through the desert

  wondering if the water will hold out

  the hallucinations turn to simple villages

  the music on the radio comes clear—

  neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung

  but a woman’s voice singing old songs

  with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute

  plucked and fingered by women outside the law.

  XIV

  It was your vision of the pilot

  confirmed my vision of you: you said, He keeps

  on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose

  while we crouched in the open hatchway

  vomiting into plastic bags

  for three hours between St. Pierre and Miquelon.

  I never felt closer to you.

  In the close cabin where the honeymoon couples

  huddled in each other’s laps and arms

  I put my hand on your thigh

  to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine,

  we stayed that way, suffering together

  in our bodies, as if all suffering

  were physical, we touched so in the presence

  of strangers who knew nothing and cared less

  vomiting their private pain

  as if all suffering were physical.

  (THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED)

  Whatever happens with us, your body

  will haunt mine—tender, delicate

  your lovemaking, like t
he half-curled frond

  of the fiddlehead fern in forests

  just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs

  between which my whole face has come and come—

  the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—

  the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—

  your touch on me, firm, protective, searching

  me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers

  reaching where I had been waiting years for you

  in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.

  XV

  If I lay on that beach with you

  white, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream

  and lying on that beach we could not stay

  because the wind drove fine sand against us

  as if it were against us

  if we tried to withstand it and we failed—

  if we drove to another place

  to sleep in each other’s arms

  and the beds were narrow like prisoners’ cots

  and we were tired and did not sleep together

  and this was what we found, so this is what we did—

  was the failure ours?

  If I cling to circumstances I could feel

  not responsible. Only she who says

  she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

  XVI

  Across a city from you, I’m with you,

  just as an August night

  moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,

  the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table

  cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight—

  or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side

  watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,

  G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,

  falling asleep to the music of the sea.

  This island of Manhattan is wide enough

  for both of us, and narrow:

  I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face

  lies upturned, the halflight tracing

  your generous, delicate mouth

  where grief and laughter sleep together.

  XVII

  No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.

  The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,

  they happen in our lives like car crashes,

  books that change us, neighborhoods

  we move into and come to love.

  Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,

  women at least should know the difference

  between love and death. No poison cup,

  no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder

  should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder

  not merely played but should have listened to us,

  and could instruct those after us:

  this we were, this is how we tried to love,

  and these are the forces they had ranged against us,

  and these are the forces we had ranged within us,

  within us and against us, against us and within us.

  XVIII

  Rain on the West Side Highway,

  red light at Riverside:

  the more I live the more I think

  two people together is a miracle.

  You’re telling the story of your life

  for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words.

  The story of our lives becomes our lives.

  Now you’re in fugue across what some I’m sure

  Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea.

  Those are the words that come to mind.

  I feel estrangement, yes. As I’ve felt dawn

  pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light—?

  Close between grief and anger, a space opens

  where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder.

  XIX

  Can it be growing colder when I begin

  to touch myself again, adhesions pull away?

  When slowly the naked face turns from staring backward

  and looks into the present,

  the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death

  and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living?

  Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream

  or in this poem, There are no miracles?

  (I told you from the first I wanted daily life,

  this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.)

  If I could let you know—

  two women together is a work

  nothing in civilization has made simple,

  two people together is a work

  heroic in its ordinariness,

  the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch

  where the fiercest attention becomes routine

  —look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

  XX

  That conversation we were always on the edge

  of having, runs on in my head,

  at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light

  polluted water yet reflecting even

  sometimes the moon

  and I discern a woman

  I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat

  and choking her like hair. And this is she

  with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head

  turning aside from pain, is dragged down deeper

  where it cannot hear me,

  and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

  XXI

  The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones

  of the great round rippled by stone implements

  the midsummer night light rising from beneath

  the horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”

  I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge

  simply nor any place but the mind

  casting back to where her solitude,

  shared, could be chosen without loneliness,

  not easily nor without pains to stake out

  the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.

  I choose to be a figure in that light,

  half-blotted by darkness, something moving

  across that space, the color of stone

  greeting the moon, yet more than stone:

  a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.

  1974–1976

  Upper Broadway

  The leafbud straggles forth

  toward the frigid light of the airshaft this is faith

  this pale extension of a day

  when looking up you know something is changing

  winter has turned though the wind is colder

  Three streets away a roof collapses onto people

  who thought they still had time Time out of mind

  I have written so many words

  wanting to live inside you

  to be of use to you

  Now I must write for myself for this blind

  woman scratching the pavement with her wand of thought

  this slippered crone inching on icy streets

  reaching into wire trashbaskets pulling out

  what was thrown away and infinitely precious

  I look at my hands and see they are still unfinished

  I look at the vine and see the leafbud

  inching towards life

  I look at my face in the glass and see

  a halfborn woman

  1975

  Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

  Paula Becker 1876–1907

  Clara Westhoff 1878–1954

  became friends at Worpswede, an artists’ colony near Bremen, Germany, summer 1899. In January 1900, spent a half-year together in Paris, where Paula painted and Clara studied sculpture with Rodin. In August they returned to Worpswede, and spent the next winter together in Berlin. In 1901, Clara married the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; soon after, Paula married the painter Otto Modersohn.
She died in a hemorrhage after childbirth, murmuring, What a pity!

  The autumn feels slowed down,

  summer still holds on here, even the light

  seems to last longer than it should

  or maybe I’m using it to the thin edge.

  The moon rolls in the air. I didn’t want this child.

  You’re the only one I’ve told.

  I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.

  Otto has a calm, complacent way

  of following me with his eyes, as if to say

  Soon you’ll have your hands full!

  And yes, I will; this child will be mine

  not his, the failures, if I fail

  will be all mine. We’re not good, Clara,

  at learning to prevent these things,

  and once we have a child, it is ours.

  But lately, I feel beyond Otto or anyone.

  I know now the kind of work I have to do.

  It takes such energy! I have the feeling I’m

  moving somewhere, patiently, impatiently,

  in my loneliness. I’m looking everywhere in nature

  for new forms, old forms in new places,

  the planes of an antique mouth, let’s say, among the leaves.

  I know and do not know

  what I am searching for.

  Remember those months in the studio together,

  you up to your strong forearms in wet clay,

  I trying to make something of the strange impressions

  assailing me—the Japanese

  flowers and birds on silk, the drunks

  sheltering in the Louvre, that river-light,

  those faces. . . . Did we know exactly

  why we were there? Paris unnerved you,

  you found it too much, yet you went on

  with your work . . . and later we met there again,

  both married then, and I thought you and Rilke

  both seemed unnerved. I felt a kind of joylessness

  between you. Of course he and I

  have had our difficulties. Maybe I was jealous

  of him, to begin with, taking you from me,

  maybe I married Otto to fill up

  my loneliness for you.

  Rainer, of course, knows more than Otto knows,

  he believes in women. But he feeds on us,

  like all of them. His whole life, his art

  is protected by women. Which of us could say that?

  Which of us, Clara, hasn’t had to take that leap

  out beyond our being women

  to save our work? or is it to save ourselves?

  Marriage is lonelier than solitude.

  Do you know: I was dreaming I had died

  giving birth to the child.

  I couldn’t paint or speak or even move.

  My child—I think—survived me. But what was funny