Collected Poems Read online

  COLLECTED POEMS

  1950-2012

  ADRIENNE

  RICH

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Claudia Rankine

  Editor’s Note

  A CHANGE OF WORLD (1951)

  Storm Warnings

  Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

  Vertigo

  The Ultimate Act

  What Ghosts Can Say

  The Kursaal at Interlaken

  Reliquary

  Purely Local

  A View of the Terrace

  By No Means Native

  Air without Incense

  For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard

  A Clock in the Square

  Why Else But to Forestall This Hour

  This Beast, This Angel

  Eastport to Block Island

  At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand

  Afterward

  The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room

  Boundary

  Five O’Clock, Beacon Hill

  From a Chapter on Literature

  An Unsaid Word

  Mathilde in Normandy

  At a Bach Concert

  The Rain of Blood

  Stepping Backward

  Itinerary

  A Revivalist in Boston

  The Return of the Evening Grosbeaks

  The Springboard

  A Change of World

  Unsounded

  Design in Living Colors

  Walden 1950

  Sunday Evening

  The Innocents

  “He Remembereth That We Are Dust”

  Life and Letters

  For the Conjunction of Two Planets

  POEMS (1950–1951)

  The Prisoners

  Night

  The House at the Cascades

  THE DIAMOND CUTTERS (1955)

  The Roadway

  Pictures by Vuillard

  Orient Wheat

  Versailles

  Annotation for an Epitaph

  Ideal Landscape

  The Celebration in the Plaza

  The Tourist and the Town

  Bears

  The Insusceptibles

  Lucifer in the Train

  Recorders in Italy

  At Hertford House

  The Wild Sky

  The Prospect

  Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell

  Villa Adriana

  The Explorers

  Landscape of the Star

  Letter from the Land of Sinners

  Concord River

  Apology

  Living in Sin

  Autumn Equinox

  The Strayed Village

  The Perennial Answer

  The Insomniacs

  The Snow Queen

  Love in the Museum

  I Heard a Hermit Speak

  Colophon

  A Walk by the Charles

  New Year Morning

  In Time of Carnival

  The Middle-Aged

  The Marriage Portion

  The Tree

  Lovers Are Like Children

  When This Clangor in the Brain

  A View of Merton College

  Holiday

  The Capital

  The Platform

  Last Song

  The Diamond Cutters

  SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW (1963)

  At Majority

  From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

  Rural Reflections

  The Knight

  The Loser

  I. I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

  II. Well, you are tougher than I thought.

  The Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame

  Euryclea’s Tale

  September 21

  After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge”

  Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

  1. You, once a belle in Shreveport,

  2. Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

  3. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

  4. Knowing themselves too well in one another:

  5. Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

  6. When to her lute Corinna sings

  7. “To have in this uncertain world some stay

  8. “You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

  9. Not that it is done well, but

  10. Well,

  Passing On

  The Raven

  Merely to Know

  I. Wedged in by earthworks

  II. Let me take you by the hair

  III. Spirit like water

  Antinoüs: The Diaries

  Juvenilia

  Double Monologue

  A Woman Mourned by Daughters

  Readings of History

  I. The Evil Eye

  II. The Confrontation

  III. Memorabilia

  IV. Consanguinity

  V. The Mirror

  VI. The Covenant

  To the Airport

  The Afterwake

  Artificial Intelligence

  A Marriage in the ’Sixties

  First Things

  Attention

  End of an Era

  Rustication

  Apology

  Sisters

  In the North

  The Classmate

  Peeling Onions

  Ghost of a Chance

  The Well

  Novella

  Face

  Prospective Immigrants Please Note

  Likeness

  The Lag

  Always the Same

  Peace

  The Roofwalker

  POEMS (1955–1957)

  At the Jewish New Year

  Moving in Winter

  NECESSITIES OF LIFE (1966)

  PART ONE: POEMS 1962–1965

  Necessities of Life

  In the Woods

  The Corpse-Plant

  The Trees

  Like This Together

  1. Wind rocks the car.

  2. They’re tearing down, tearing up

  3. We have, as they say,

  4. Our words misunderstand us.

  5. Dead winter doesn’t die,

  Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York

  Open-Air Museum

  Two Songs

  1. Sex, as they harshly call it,

  2. That “old last act”!

  The Parting

  Night-Pieces: For a Child

  The Crib

  Her Waking

  The Stranger

  After Dark

  I. You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you

  II. Now let’s away from prison—

  Mourning Picture

  “I Am in Danger—Sir—”

  Halfway

  Autumn Sequence

  1. An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin,

  2. Still, a sweetness hardly earned

  3. Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb

  4. Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

  Noon

  Not Like That

  The Knot

  Any Husband to Any Wife

  Side by Side

  Spring Thunder

  1. Thunder is all it is, and yet

  2. Whatever you are that weeps

  3. The power of the dinosaur

  4. A soldier is here, an ancient figure,

  5. Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,

  Moth Hour

  Focus

  Face to Face

  PART TWO: TRANSLATIONS FROM THE DUTCH

  Martinus Nijhoff, The Song of the Foolish Bees

  Hendrik de Vries, My Brother

  Hendrik de Vries, Fever

>   Gerrit Achterberg, Eben Haëzer

  Gerrit Achterberg, Accountability

  Gerrit Achterberg, Statue

  Leo Vroman, Our Family

  Chr. J. van Geel, Homecoming

  Chr. J. van Geel, Sleepwalking

  POEMS (1962–1965)

  To Judith, Taking Leave

  Roots

  The Parting: II

  Winter

  LEAFLETS (1969)

  PART ONE: NIGHT WATCH

  Orion

  Holding Out

  Flesh and Blood

  In the Evening

  Missing the Point

  City (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

  Dwingelo (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg)

  The Demon Lover

  Jerusalem

  Charleston in the 1860’s

  Night Watch

  There Are Such Springlike Nights (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky)

  For a Russian Poet

  1. The Winter Dream

  2. Summer in the Country

  3. The Demonstration

  Night in the Kitchen

  5:30 A.M.

  The Break

  Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova)

  1. There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses:

  2. On the terrace, violins played

  The Key

  Picnic

  The Book

  Abnegation

  PART TWO: LEAFLETS

  Women

  Implosions

  To Frantz Fanon

  Continuum

  On Edges

  Violence

  The Observer

  Nightbreak

  Gabriel

  Leaflets

  1. The big star, and that other

  2. Your face

  3. If, says the Dahomeyan devil,

  4. Crusaders’ wind glinting

  5. The strain of being born

  The Rafts

  PART THREE: GHAZALS (HOMAGE TO GHALIB)

  The clouds are electric in this university.

  The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit,

  In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

  Did you think I was talking about my life?

  Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

  When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

  Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon.

  When your sperm enters me, it is altered;

  The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature.

  The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.

  Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

  A dead mosquito, flattened against a door;

  So many minds in search of bodies

  The order of the small town on the riverbank,

  If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

  From here on, all of us will be living

  A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

  POEMS (1967–1969)

  Postcard

  White Night (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky)

  The Days: Spring

  Tear Gas

  THE WILL TO CHANGE (1971)

  November 1968

  Study of History

  Planetarium

  The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

  1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, …

  2. To imagine a time of silence

  3. “People suffer highly in poverty …

  4. We lie under the sheet

  5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, …

  I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

  The Blue Ghazals

  Violently asleep in the old house.

  One day of equinoctial light after another,

  A man, a woman, a city.

  Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys,

  Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

  They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket,

  There are days when I seem to have nothing

  Frost, burning. The city’s ill.

  Pain made her conservative.

  Pierrot Le Fou

  1. Suppose you stood facing

  2. On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.

  3. Suppose we had time

  4. The island blistered our feet.

  5. When I close my eyes

  6. To record

  Letters: March 1969

  1. Foreknown. The victor

  2. Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

  3. “I am up at sunrise

  4. Six months back

  Pieces

  1. Breakpoint

  2. Relevance

  3. Memory

  4. Time and Place

  5. Revelation

  Our Whole Life

  Your Letter

  Stand Up

  The Stelae

  Snow

  The Will to Change

  1. That Chinese restaurant was a joke

  2. Knocked down in the canefield

  3. Beardless again, phoning

  4. At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes

  5. The cabdriver from the Bronx

  The Photograph of the Unmade Bed

  Images for Godard

  1. Language as city:: Wittgenstein

  2. To know the extremes of light

  3. To love, to move perpetually

  4. At the end of Alphaville

  5. Interior monologue of the poet:

  A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

  Shooting Script

  PART I: 11/69–2/70

  1. We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

  2. Ghazal V (adapted from Mirza Ghalib)

  3. The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up.

  4. In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning.

  5. Of simple choice they are the villagers; …

  6. You are beside me like a wall; …

  7. Picking the wax to crumbs …

  PART II: 3–7/70

  8. A woman waking behind grimed blinds …

  9. (Newsreel)

  10. They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

  11. The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.

  12. I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.

  13. We are driven to odd attempts; …

  14. Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier …

  DIVING INTO THE WRECK (1971–1972)

  I.

  Trying to Talk with a Man

  When We Dead Awaken

  Waking in the Dark

  Incipience

  After Twenty Years

  The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One

  From the Prison House

  The Stranger

  Song

  Dialogue

  Diving into the Wreck

  II. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ANGER

  The Phenomenology of Anger

  III.

  Merced

  A Primary Ground

  Translations

  Living in a Cave

  The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message

  Rape

  Burning Oneself In

  Burning Oneself Out

  For a Sister

  For the Dead

  From a Survivor

  August

  IV. MEDITATIONS FOR A SAVAGE CHILD

  Meditations for a Savage Child

  POEMS (1973–1974)

  Dien Bien Phu

  Essential Resources

  Blood-Sister

  The Wave

  Re-forming the Crystal

  The Fourth Month of the Landscape Architect

  The Alleged Murderess Walking in Her Cell

  White Night

  Amnesia

  For L.G.:
Unseen for Twenty Years

  Family Romance

  From an Old House in America

  The Fact of a Doorframe

  THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE (1974–1977)

  I. POWER

  Power

  Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev

  Origins and History of Consciousness

  Splittings

  Hunger

  To a Poet

  Cartographies of Silence

  The Lioness

  II. TWENTY-ONE LOVE POEMS

  I. Wherever in this city, screens flicker

  II. I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

  III. Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time

  IV. I come home from you through the early light of spring

  V. This apartment full of books could crack open

  VI. Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—

  VII. What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

  VIII. I can see myself years back at Sunion,

  IX. Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

  X. Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through

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

  XII. Sleeping, turning in turn like planets

  XIII. The rules break like a thermometer,

  XIV. It was your vision of the pilot

  (The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)

  XV. If I lay on that beach with you

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

  XVII. No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.

  XVIII. Rain on the West Side Highway,

  XIX. Can it be growing colder when I begin

  XX. That conversation we were always on the edge

  XXI. The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones

  III. NOT SOMEWHERE ELSE, BUT HERE

  Not Somewhere Else, But Here

  Upper Broadway

  Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff

  Nights and Days

  Sibling Mysteries

  A Woman Dead in Her Forties

  Mother-Right

  Natural Resources

  Toward the Solstice

  Transcendental Etude

  A WILD PATIENCE HAS TAKEN ME THIS FAR (1978–1981)

  The Images

  Coast to Coast

  Integrity

  Culture and Anarchy

  For Julia in Nebraska

  Transit

  For Memory

  What Is Possible

  For Ethel Rosenberg

  Mother-in-Law

  Heroines

  Grandmothers

  1. Mary Gravely Jones

  2. Hattie Rice Rich

  3. Granddaughter

  The Spirit of Place

  I. Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett

  II. The mountain laurel in bloom

  III. Strangers are an endangered species

  IV. The river-fog will do for privacy

  V. Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

  Frame

  Rift

  A Vision

  Turning the Wheel

  1. Location

  2. Burden Baskets

  3. Hohokam

  4. Self-hatred

  5. Particularity

  6. Apparition

  7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904