Later Poems Selected and New

by Adrienne Rich

  “Swing Low,” and most of all

  “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord”

  How we sang out the chorus how I loved

  the watchfires of the hundred circling camps

  and truth is marching on and let us die to make men free

  4.

  Piano lessons The mother and the daughter

  Their doomed exhaustion their common mystery

  worked out in finger-exercises Czerny, Hanon

  The yellow Schirmer albums quarter-rests double-holds

  glyphs of an astronomy the mother cannot teach

  the daughter because this is not the story

  of a mother teaching magic to her daughter

  Side by side I see us locked

  My wrists your voice are tightened

  Passion lives in old songs in the kitchen

  where another woman cooks teaches and sings

  He shall feed his flock like a shepherd

  and in the booklined room

  where the Jewish father reads and smokes and teaches

  Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Songs

  The daughter struggles with the strange notations

  —dark chart of music’s ocean flowers and flags

  but would rather learn by ear and heart The mother

  says she must learn to read by sight not ear and heart

  5.

  Daughter who fought her mother’s lessons—

  even today a scrip of music balks me—

  I feel illiterate in this

  your mother-tongue Had it been Greek or Slovak

  no more could your native alphabet have baffled

  your daughter whom you taught for years

  held by a tether over the ivory

  and ebony teeth of the Steinway

  It is

  the three hundredth anniversary of Johann

  Sebastian Bach My earliest life

  woke to his English Suites under your fingers

  I understand a language I can’t read

  Music you played streams on the car radio

  in the freeway night

  You kept your passions deep You have them still

  I ask you, both of us

  —Did you think mine was a virtuoso’s hand?

  Did I see power in yours?

  What was worth fighting for? What did you want?

  What did I want from you?

  1985–1988

  This

  Face flashing free child-arms

  lifting the collie pup

  torn paper on the path

  Central Park April ’72

  behind you minimal

  those benches and that shade

  that brilliant light in which

  you laughed longhaired

  and I’m the keeper of

  this little piece of paper

  this little piece of truth

  I wanted this from you—

  laughter a child turning

  into a boy at ease

  in the spring light with friends

  I wanted this for you

  I could mutter Give back

  that day give me again

  that child with the chance

  of making it all right

  I could yell Give back that light

  on the dog’s teeth the child’s hair

  but no rough drafts are granted

  —Do you think I don’t remember?

  did you think I was all-powerful

  unimpaired unappalled?

  yes you needed that from me

  I wanted this from you

  1985

  Negotiations

  Someday if someday comes we will agree

  that trust is not about safety

  that keeping faith is not about deciding

  to clip our fingernails exactly

  to the same length or wearing

  a uniform that boasts our unanimity

  Someday if someday comes we’ll know

  the difference between liberal laissez-faire

  pluralism and the way you cut your hair

  and the way I clench my hand

  against my cheekbone

  both being possible gestures of defiance

  Someday if there’s a someday we will

  bring food, you’ll say I can’t eat what you’ve brought

  I’ll say Have some in the name of our

  trying to be friends, you’ll say What about you?

  We’ll taste strange meat and we’ll admit

  we’ve tasted stranger

  Someday if someday ever comes we’ll go

  back and reread those poems and manifestos

  that so enraged us in each other’s hand

  I’ll say, But damn, you wrote it so I

  couldn’t write it off You’ll say

  I read you always, even when I hated you

  1986

  In a Classroom

  Talking of poetry, hauling the books

  arm-full to the table where the heads

  bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,

  talking of consonants, elision,

  caught in the how, oblivious of why:

  I look in your face, Jude,

  neither frowning nor nodding,

  opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:

  a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking

  What I cannot say, is me. For that I came.

  1986

  The Novel

  All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and

  Peace

  Prince Andrei’s cold eyes taking in the sky from the battlefield

  were your eyes, you went walking wrapped in his wound

  like a padded coat against the winds from the two rivers

  You went walking in the streets as if you were ordinary

  as if you hadn’t been pulling with your raw mittened hand

  on the slight strand that held your tattered mind

  blown like an old stocking from a wire

  on the wind between two rivers.

  All winter you asked nothing

  of that book though it lay heavy on your knees

  you asked only for a shed skin, many skins in which to walk

  you were old woman, child, commander

  you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing

  you felt your heart go still while your eyes swept the pages

  you felt the pages thickening to the left and on the right-

  hand growing few, you knew the end was coming

  you knew beyond the ending lay

  your own, unwritten life

  1986

  In Memoriam: D.K.

  A man walking on the street

  feels unwell has felt unwell

  all week, a little Yet the flowers crammed

  in pots on the corner: furled anemones:

  he knows they open

  burgundy, violet, pink, amarillo

  all the way to their velvet cores

  The flowers hanging over the fence: fuchsias:

  each tongued, staring, all of a fire:

  the flowers He who has

  been happy oftener than sad

  carelessly happy well oftener than sick

  one of the lucky is thinking about death

  and its music about poetry

  its translations of his life

  And what good will it do you

  to go home and put on the Mozart Requiem?

  Read Keats? How will culture cure you?

  Poor, unhappy

  unwell culture what can it sing or say

  six weeks from now, to you?

  Give me your living hand If I could take the hour

  death moved into you undeclared, unnamed

  —even if sweet, if I could take that hour

  between my forceps tear at it like a monster

  wrench it out of your flesh dissolve its shape in quicklime

>   and make you well again

  no, not again

  but still. . . .

  1986

  Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

  Two green-webbed chairs

  a three-legged stool between

  Your tripod

  Spears of grass

  longer than your bare legs

  cast shadows on your legs

  drawn up

  from the red-and-black

  cardboard squares

  the board of play

  the board of rules

  But you’re not playing, you’re talking

  It’s midsummer

  and greater rules are breaking

  It’s the last

  innocent summer you will know

  and I

  will go on awhile pretending that’s not true

  When I have done pretending

  I can see this:

  the depth of the background

  shadows

  not of one moment only

  erased and charcoaled in again

  year after year

  how the tree looms back behind you

  the first tree of the forest

  the last tree

  from which the deer step out

  from protection

  the first tree

  into dreadfulness

  The last and the first tree

  1987

  Sleepwalking Next to Death

  Sleep horns of a snail

  protruding, retracting

  What we choose to know

  or not know

  all these years

  sleepwalking

  next to death

  I

  This snail could have been eaten

  This snail could have been crushed

  This snail could have dreamed it was a painter or a poet

  This snail could have driven fast at night

  putting up graffiti with a spray-gun:

  This snail could have ridden

  in the back of the pick-up, handing guns

  II

  Knows, chooses not to know

  It has always

  been about death and chances

  The Dutch artist wrote and painted

  one or more strange and usable things

  For I mean to meet you

  in any land in any language

  This is my promise:

  I will be there

  if you are there

  III

  In between this and that there are different places

  of waiting, airports mostly where the air

  is hungover, visibility low boarding passes not guaranteed

  If you wrote me, I sat next to Naomi

  I would read that, someone who felt like Ruth

  I would begin reading you like a dream

  That’s how extreme it feels

  that’s what I have to do

  IV

  Every stone around your neck you know the reason for

  at this time in your life Relentlessly

  you tell me their names and furiously I

  forget their names Forgetting the names of the stones

  you love, you lover of stones

  what is it I do?

  V

  What is it I do? I refuse to take your place

  in the world I refuse to make myself

  your courier I refuse so much

  I might ask, what is it I do?

  I will not be the dreamer for whom

  you are the only dream

  I will not be your channel

  I will wrestle you to the end

  for our difference (as you have wrestled me)

  I will change your name and confuse

  the Angel

  VI

  I am stupid with you and practical with you

  I remind you to take a poultice forget a quarrel

  I am a snail in the back of the pick-up handing you

  vitamins you hate to take

  VII

  Calmly you look over my shoulder at this page and say

  It’s all about you None of this

  tells my story

  VIII

  Yesterday noon I stood by a river

  and many waited to cross over

  from the Juarez barrio

  to El Paso del Norte

  First day of spring a stand of trees

  in Mexico were in palegreen leaf

  a man casting a net

  into the Rio Grande

  and women, in pairs, strolling

  across the border

  as if taking a simple walk

  Many thousands go

  I stood by the river and thought of you

  young in Mexico in a time of hope

  IX

  The practical nurse is the only nurse

  with her plastic valise of poultices and salves

  her hands of glove leather and ebony

  her ledgers of pain

  The practical nurse goes down to the river

  in her runover shoes and her dollar necklace

  eating a burrito in hand

  it will be a long day

  a long labor

  the midwife will be glad to see her

  it will be a long night someone bleeding

  from a botched abortion a beating Will you let her touch you

  now?

  Will you tell her you’re fine?

  X

  I’m afraid of the border patrol

  Not those men

  of La Migra who could have run us

  into the irrigation canal with their van

  I’m afraid

  of the patrollers

  the sleepwalker in me

  the loner in you

  XI

  I want five hours with you

  in a train running south

  maybe ten hours

  in a Greyhound bound for the border

  the two seats side-by-side that become a home

  an island of light in the continental dark

  the time that takes the place of a lifetime

  I promise I won’t fall asleep when the lights go down

  I will not be lulled

  Promise you won’t jump the train

  vanish into the bus depot at three a.m.

  that you won’t defect

  that we’ll travel

  like two snails

  our four horns erect

  1987

  Delta

  If you have taken this rubble for my past

  raking through it for fragments you could sell

  know that I long ago moved on

  deeper into the heart of the matter

  If you think you can grasp me, think again:

  my story flows in more than one direction

  a delta springing from the riverbed

  with its five fingers spread

  1987

  6/21

  It’s June and summer’s height

  the longest bridge of light

  leaps from all the rivets

  of the sky

  Yet it’s of earth

  and nowhere else I have to speak

  Only on earth has this light taken on

  these swivelled meanings, only on this earth

  where we are dying befouled, gritting our teeth

  losing our guiding stars

  has this light

  found an alphabet a mouth

  1987

  Dreamwood

  In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand

  there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see

  or the child’s older self,

  a woman dreaming when she should be typing

  the last report of the day. If this were a map,

  she thinks, a map laid down to memorize

  because she might be walking it, it shows

  ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert,

  here and there a sign o
f aquifers

  and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map

  it would be the map of the last age of her life,

  not a map of choices but a map of variations

  on the one great choice. It would be the map by which

  she could see the end of touristic choices,

  of distances blued and purpled by romance,

  by which she would recognize that poetry

  isn’t revolution but a way of knowing

  why it must come. If this cheap, massproduced

  wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,

  massproduced yet durable, being here now,

  is what it is yet a dream-map

  so obdurate, so plain,

  she thinks, the material and the dream can join

  and that is the poem and that is the late report.

  1987

  Harpers Ferry

  Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads

  glittering at each other’s throats, the Virginia mountains fading

  across the gorge, the October-shortened sun, the wooden town,

  rebellion sprouting encampments in the hills

  and a white girl running away from home

  who will have to see it all. But where do I get this, how

  do I know how the light quails from the trembling

  waters, autumn goes to ash from ridge to ridge

  how behind the gunmetal pines the guns

  are piled, the sun drops, and the watchfires burn?

  I know the men’s faces tremble like smoky

  crevices in a cave where candle-stumps have been stuck

  on ledges by fugitives. The men are dark and sometimes pale

  like her, their eyes pouched or blank or squinting, all by now

  are queer, outside, and out of bounds and have no membership

  in any brotherhood but this: where power is handed from

  the ones who can get it to the ones

  who have been refused. It’s a simple act,

  to steal guns and hand them to the slaves. Who would have thought

  it.

  Running away from home is slower than her quick feet thought

  and this is not the vague and lowering North, ghostland of deeper

  snows

  than she has ever pictured

  but this is one exact and definite place,

  a wooden village at the junction of two rivers

  two trestle bridges hinged and splayed,

  low houses crawling up the mountains.

  Suppose she slashes her leg on a slashed pine’s tooth, ties the leg

  in a kerchief

  knocks on the door of a house, the first on the edge of town

  has to beg water, won’t tell her family name, afraid someone will

  know her family face