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Later Poems Selected and New

Page 22

by Adrienne Rich

in the small steamed-up copy shop

  slush tracked in across a wooden floor

  then shivering elated

  in twilight

  at the bus stop with others a public happiness

  7

  Not simple is it to do

  a guide’s work the novices

  irrupting hourly with their own bad vigor

  knowing not who they are

  every phase of moon an excuse

  for fibrillating

  besides the need in today’s world

  to consider

  outreach the new thinking

  —Or: love will strongly move you

  or commerce will

  You want a priest? go to the altar

  where eternal bargains are struck

  want love?

  go down inside your destructible heart

  8

  In Almodóvar’s film

  we go for truth to the prostitutes’ field

  to find past and future

  elegant beaten-up and knifed

  sex without gender

  preyed-on and preying

  transactions zones of play

  the circling drivers

  in search of their desires

  theater of love Ninth Circle

  there are so many teachers

  here no fire can shrink them

  Do you understand? you could get your face

  slashed in such a place

  Do you think this is a movie?

  9

  She says: I gave my name and it was taken

  I no longer have my name

  I gave my word and it was broken

  My words are learning

  to walk on crutches

  through traffic

  without stammering

  My name is a prisoner

  who will not name names

  She says: I gave my tongue

  to love and this

  makes it hard to speak

  She says: When my life depended

  on one of two

  opposite terms

  I dared mix beauty with courage

  they were my lovers

  together they were tortured

  10

  Sick of my own old poems caught

  on rainshower Fifth Avenue

  in a bookstore

  I reach to a shelf

  and there you are Pier Paolo

  speaking to Gramsci’s ashes

  in the old encircling rhyme

  Vivo nel non volere

  del tramontato dopoguerra:

  amando

  il mondo che odio . . .

  that vernacular voice

  intimately political

  and that was how you died

  so I clasp my book to my heart

  as the shop closes

  11

  Under the blackened dull-metal corners

  of the small espresso pot

  a jet flares blue

  a smell tinctures the room

  —some sniff or prescience of

  a life that actually could be

  lived a grain of hope

  a bite of bitter chocolate in the subway

  to pull on our senses

  without them we’re prey

  to the failed will

  its science of despair

  12

  How I hate it when you ascribe to me

  a “woman’s vision”

  cozy with coffeepots drawn curtains

  or leaning in black leather dress

  over your chair

  black fingernail tracing your lines

  overspent Sibyl drifting in a bottle

  How I’ve hated speaking “as a woman”

  for mere continuation

  when the broken is what I saw

  As a woman do I love

  and hate? as a woman

  do I munch my bitter chocolate underground?

  Yes. No. You too

  sexed as you are hating

  this whole thing you keep on it remaking

  13

  Where the novice pulls the guide

  across frozen air

  where the guide suddenly grips the shoulder

  of the novice where the moss is golden

  the sky sponged with pink at sunset

  where the urine of reindeer barely vanished

  stings the air like a sharp herb

  where the throat of the clear-cut opens

  across the surrendered forest

  I’m most difficultly

  with you I lead

  and I follow

  our shadows reindeer-huge

  slip onto the map

  of chance and purpose figures

  on the broken crust

  exchanging places bites to eat

  a glance

  2000

  Four Short Poems

  1

  (driving home from Robin Blaser’s reading)

  The moon

  is not romantic. No. It’s

  a fact of life and still

  we aren’t inured. You would think, it reflects

  the waves not draws them. So

  I’d compel you as I

  have been compelled by you. On the coast road

  between drafts of fog

  that face (and yes, it is

  expressioned) breaking in and out

  doth speak to us

  as he did in his courtliness

  and operatic mystery.

  2

  We’re not yet out of the everglades

  of the last century

  our body parts are still there

  though we would have our minds careen and swoop

  over the new ocean

  with a wild surmise

  the bloody strings

  tangled and stuck between

  become our lyre

  3

  Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand piano

  in a small California town by a boy from Prague

  here for a month to learn American

  This is not “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

  This is one who startles the neighbors with his owning

  of the transmissible heritage one evening

  then for the whole month droops over the Internet.

  4

  From the new crudities, from the old

  apartheid spraying ruin on revolution,

  back to Du Bois of Great Barrington and Africa

  or Kafka of the intransmissible

  tradition

  the stolen secrets in the cleft

  reside and this, beloved poets

  is where our hearts, livers and lights still

  dwell unbeknownst and vital

  for Elizabeth Willis and for Peter Gizzi

  2000

  Rauschenberg’s Bed

  How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes

  unsleepable site of anarchy What body holes expressed

  their exaltation loathing exhaustion

  what horse of night has pawed those sheets

  what talk under the blanket raveled

  what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion

  what traveler homeward reached for familiar bedding

  and felt stiff tatters under his fingers

  How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical

  inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow

  How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads

  while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing

  Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts

  sometimes eking forth from its laden springs

  pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne

  Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes

  for the nether hole the everywhere

  How the children sleep and wake

  the children sleep awake upstairs

  How
on a single night the driver of roads comes back

  into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer

  leans toward what’s there for warmth

  human limbs human crust

  2000

  Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot

  I sat down facing the steep place where

  tours clambered upward and others straggled down, the redwoods outstanding all

  A family, East Asian, holding a picnic at their van:

  “We are always hungry,” the older sister said laughing, “and we always bring our food”

  Roses clambered a rough fence in the slanting sun that speared the redwoods

  We’d gone into the gift shop while waiting for your tour

  found Davy Crockett coonskin caps, deerskin coin purses

  scorpions embedded in plastic, MYSTERY SPOT bumper stickers

  and postcards of men you wouldn’t be left alone with

  a moment if you could help it, illustrating

  the Mystery Spot and its tricks with gravity and horizon

  Your tour was called and you started upward. I went back

  to my redwood bench

  “The mystai streamed”

  toward the

  mystery

  But if anything up there was occult

  nothing at ground level was: tiny beings flashing around

  in the sun secure knowing their people were nearby

  grandfathers, aunts, elder brothers or sisters, parents and loved friends

  You could see how it was when each tour was called and gathered itself

  who rode on what shoulders, ran alongside, held hands

  the languages all different, English the least of these

  I sat listening to voices watching the miraculous migration

  of sunshafts through the redwoods the great spears folding up

  into letters from the sun deposited through dark green slots

  each one saying

  I love you but

  I must draw away Believe, I will return

  Then: happiness! your particular figures

  in the descending crowd: Anne, Jacob, Charlie!

  Anne with her sandals off

  in late day warmth and odor and odd wonder

  2000

  Ends of the Earth

  All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken television set.

  Coarse-frosted karst crumbling as foam, eel eyes piercing the rivers.

  Dark or light, leaving or landfall, male or female demarcations dissolve

  into the O of time and solitude. I found here: no inter/

  ruption to a version of earth so abandoned and abandoning

  I read it my own acedia lashed by the winds

  questing shredmeal toward the Great Plains, that ocean. My fear.

  Call it Galisteo but that’s not the name of what happened here.

  If indoors in an eyeflash (perhaps) I caught the gazer of spaces

  lighting the two wax candles in black iron holders

  against the white wall after work and after dark

  but never saw the hand

  how inhale the faint mist of another’s gazing, pacing, dozing

  words muttered aloud in utter silence, gesture unaware

  thought that has suffered and borne itself to the ends of the earth

  web agitating between my life and another’s?

  Other whose bed I have shared but never at once together?

  2000

  The School

  Among the Ruins

  * * *

  Centaur’s Requiem

  Your hooves drawn together underbelly

  shoulders in mud your mane

  of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you

  your longhaired neck

  eyes jaw yes and ears

  unforgivably human on such a creature

  unforgivably what you are

  deposited in the grit-kicked field of a champion

  tender neck and nostrils teacher water-lily suction-spot

  what you were marvelous we could not stand

  Night drops an awaited storm

  driving in to wreck your path

  Foam on your hide like flowers

  where you fell or fall desire

  2001

  Equinox

  Time split like a fruit between dark and light

  and a usual fog drags

  over this landfall

  I’ve walked September end to end

  barefoot room to room

  carrying in hand a knife well honed for cutting stem or root

  or wick eyes open

  to abalone shells memorial candle flames

  split lemons roses laid

  along charring logs Gorgeous things

  : : dull acres of developed land as we had named it: Nowhere

  wetland burnt garbage looming at its heart

  gunmetal thicket midnightblue blood and

  tricking masks I thought I knew

  history was not a novel

  So can I say it was not I listed as Innocence

  betrayed you serving (and protesting always)

  the motives of my government

  thinking we’d scratch out a place

  where poetry old subversive shape

  grew out of Nowhere here?

  where skin could lie on skin

  a place “outside the limits”

  Can say I was mistaken?

  To be so bruised: in the soft organs skeins of consciousness

  Over and over have let it be

  damage to others crushing of the animate core

  that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world

  so bruised: heart spleen long inflamed ribbons of the guts

  the spine’s vertical necklace swaying

  Have let it swarm

  through us let it happen

  as it must, inmost

  but before this: long before this those 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 hour the 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 up for the public not wanting

  to write it down in secret

  just to lie here in this cold story

  feeling it trying to feel it through

  2

  Blink and smoke, flicking with absent nail

  at the mica bar

  where she refills without asking

  Crouch into your raingarb this 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

  hot keeps body

  in leaden hour

  simmering

  2001

  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 earth neither 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 ornament human debris

  when fear vacuums out the streets

  When the whole town flinches

  blood on the undersole thickening to glass

  Whoever crosses hunched knees bent a contested zone

  knows why she does this suicidal thing

  School’s now in session day and night

  children sleep

  in the classrooms teachers rolled close

  3

  How the good teacher loved

  his school the students

  the lunchroom with fresh sandwiches

  lemonade and milk

  the classroom glass 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 shivering it’s September

  Second question: where is my mother?

  4

  One: I don’t know where your mother

  is Two: I don’t know

  why they are trying to hurt us

  Three: or the latitude and longitude

  of their hatred Four: I don’t know if we

  hate them as much I think there’s more toilet paper

  in the supply closet I’m going to break it open

  Today this is your lesson:

  write as clearly as you can

  your name home street and 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

 

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