Collected Poems Read online

8. Turning the Wheel

  YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE (1981–1985)

  I. SOURCES

  Sources

  II. NORTH AMERICAN TIME

  For the Record

  North American Time

  Education of a Novelist

  Virginia 1906

  Dreams Before Waking

  When/Then

  Upcountry

  One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem

  In the Wake of Home

  What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be

  For an Occupant

  Emily Carr

  Poetry: I

  Poetry: II, Chicago

  Poetry: III

  Baltimore:a fragment from the Thirties

  New York

  Homage to Winter

  Blue Rock

  Yom Kippur 1984

  Edges

  III. CONTRADICTIONS: TRACKING POEMS

  1. Look:this is Januarythe worst onslaught

  2. Heart of cold.Bones of cold.Scalp of cold

  3. My mouth hovers across your breasts

  4. He slammed his hand across my faceand I

  5. She is carrying my madnessand I dread her

  6. Dear Adrienne:I’m calling you up tonight

  7. Dear Adrienne,I feel signified by pain

  8. I’m afraid of prison.Have been all these years.

  9. Tearing but not yet torn:this page

  10. Nightover the great and the little worlds

  11. I came out of the hospital like a woman

  12. Violence as purification:the one idea.

  13. Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings,

  14. Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences

  15. You who think I find words for everything,

  16. It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived

  17. I have backroads I taketo places

  18. The problem, unstated till now, is how

  19. If to feel is to be unreliable

  20. The tobacco fields lie fallowthe migrant pickers

  21. The cat-tails blaze in the cornersunflowers

  22. In a bald skull sits our friendin a helmet

  23. You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,

  24. Someone said to me:It’s just that we don’t

  25. Did anyone ever know who we were

  26. You:air-drivenreftfrom the tuber-bitten soil

  27. The Tolstoyansthe Afro-American slaves

  28. This high summer we love will pour its light

  29. You who think I find words for everything

  TIME’S POWER (1985–1988)

  Solfeggietto

  This

  Love Poem

  Negotiations

  In a Classroom

  The Novel

  A Story

  In Memoriam: D.K.

  Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

  SleepwalkingNext to Death

  Letters in the Family

  The Desert as Garden of Paradise

  Delta

  6/21

  For an Album

  Dreamwood

  Walking Down the Road

  The Slides

  Harpers Ferry

  One Life

  Divisions of Labor

  Living Memory

  Turning

  AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD (1988–1991)

  I. AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD

  I. A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

  II. Here is a map of our country:

  III. Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, …

  IV. Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds

  V. Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

  VI. A potato explodes in the oven.Poetry and famine:

  VII. (The Dream-Site) Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled

  VIII. He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him. He depended on that:

  IX. On this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you’re lonely.

  X. Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness, homesickness; lonely retreat.

  XI. One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century:

  XII. What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last

  XIII. (Dedications) I know you are reading this poem

  II.

  She

  That Mouth

  Marghanita

  Olivia

  Eastern War Time

  1. Memory lifts her smoky mirror:1943,

  2. Girl between home and school,what is that girl

  3. How telegrams used to come:ring

  4. What the grown-ups can’t speak ofwould you push

  5. A young girl knows she is young and meant to live

  6. A girl wanders with a boy into the woods

  7. A woman of sixtydriving

  8. A woman wired in memories

  9. Streets closed, emptied by forceGuns at corners

  10. Memory says:Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

  Tattered Kaddish

  Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud

  I. Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud

  II. Showering after ’flu; stripping the bed;

  III. If you know who died in that bed, do you know

  IV. That light of outrage is the light of history

  V. She who died on that bed sees it her way:

  For a Friend in Travail

  1948: Jews

  Two Arts

  1. I’ve redone you by daylight.

  2. Raise it up there and it will

  Darklight

  I. Early day.Grey the air.

  II. When heat leaves the walls at last

  Final Notations

  DARK FIELDS OF THE REPUBLIC (1991–1995)

  WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

  What Kind of Times Are These

  In Those Years

  To the Days

  Miracle Ice Cream

  Rachel

  Amends

  Calle Visión

  1. Not what you thought:just a turn-off

  2. Calle Visiónsand in your teeth

  3. Lodged in the difficult hotel

  4. Calle Visiónyour heart beats on unbroken

  5. Ammonia

  6. The repetitive motions of slaughtering

  7. You can call on beauty still and it will leap

  8. In the roomin the house

  9. In the black net

  10. On the road there is a house

  Reversion

  Revolution in Permanence (1953, 1993)

  THEN OR NOW

  Food Packages: 1947

  Innocence: 1945

  Sunset, December, 1993

  Deportations

  And Now

  Sending Love

  Voice

  Sending love:Molly sends it

  Sending love is harmless

  Terrence years ago

  Take

  Late Ghazal

  Six Narratives

  1. You drew up the story of your life

  2. You drew up a story about me

  3. You were telling a story about women to young men

  4. You were telling a story about love

  5. I was telling you a story about love

  6. You were telling a story about war

  From Piercéd Darkness

  INSCRIPTIONS

  One:comrade

  Two:movement

  Three:origins

  Four:history

  Five:voices

  Six:edgelit

  MIDNIGHT SALVAGE (1995–1998)

  The Art of Translation

  For an Anniversary

  Midnight Salvage

  Char

  Modotti

  Shattered Head

  1941

  Letters to a Young Poet

  Camino Real

  Plaza Street and Flatbush

  Seven Skins

  “Th
e Night Has a Thousand Eyes”

  Rusted Legacy

  A Long Conversation

  FOX (1998–2000)

  Victory

  Veterans Day

  For This

  Regardless

  Signatures

  Nora’s Gaze

  Architect

  Fox

  Messages

  Fire

  Twilight

  Octobrish

  Second Sight

  Grating

  Noctilucent Clouds

  If Your Name Is on the List

  1999

  Terza Rima

  Four Short Poems

  Rauschenberg’s Bed

  Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot

  Ends of the Earth

  THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS (2000–2004)

  I.

  Centaur’s Requiem

  Equinox

  Tell Me

  For June, in the Year 2001

  The School Among the Ruins

  This evening let’s

  Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet

  Delivered Clean

  The Eye

  There Is No One Story and One Story Only

  II.

  USonian Journals 2000

  III. TERRITORY SHARED

  Address

  Transparencies

  Livresque

  Collaborations

  Ritual Acts

  Point in Time

  IV. ALTERNATING CURRENT

  Sometimes I’m back in that city

  No bad dreams.Night, the bed, the faint clockface.

  Take one, take two

  What’s suffered in laughterin aroused afternoons

  A deluxe blending machine

  As finally by wind or grass

  When we are shaken out

  V.

  Memorize This

  The Painter’s House

  After Apollinaire & Brassens

  Slashes

  Trace Elements

  Bract

  VI. DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS

  1 Still learning the word

  2 In a vast dystopic space the small things

  3 City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker

  4 For recalcitrancy of attitude

  5 Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain

  6 Not to get up and go back to the drafting table

  7 Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment

  VII.

  Five O’Clock, January 2003

  Wait

  Don’t Take Me

  To Have Written the Truth

  Screen Door

  VIII. TENDRIL

  Tendril

  TELEPHONE RINGING IN THE LABYRINTH (2004–2006)

  I.

  Voyage to the Denouement

  Calibrations

  Skeleton Key

  Wallpaper

  In Plain Sight

  Behind the Motel

  Melancholy Piano (extracts)

  II.

  Archaic

  Long After Stevens

  Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme”

  Rhyme

  Hotel

  Three Elegies

  I. Late Style

  II. As Ever

  III. Fallen Figure

  Hubble Photographs: After Sappho

  This Is Not the Room

  Unknown Quantity

  Tactile Value

  Midnight, the Same Day

  I. When the sun seals my eyes the emblem

  II. Try to rest now, says a voice

  Even Then Maybe

  Director’s Notes

  Rereading The Dead Lecturer

  III.

  Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender, or Judged Unfit to Send

  IV.

  If/As Though

  Time Exposures

  I. Glance into glittering moisture

  II. Is there a doctor in the house

  III. They’d say she was humorless

  IV. When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking

  V. You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog

  The University Reopens as the Floods Recede

  Via Insomnia

  A Burning Kangaroo

  Ever, Again

  V.

  Draft #2006

  VI.

  Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

  TONIGHT NO POETRY WILL SERVE (2007–2010)

  I.

  Waiting for Rain, for Music

  Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time

  Benjamin Revisited

  Innocence

  Domain

  Fracture

  Turbulence

  Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

  II.

  Scenes of Negotiation

  III.

  From Sickbed Shores

  IV. AXEL AVÁKAR

  Axel Avákar

  Axel: backstory

  Axel, in thunder

  I was there, Axel

  Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

  V.

  Ballade of the Poverties

  Emergency Clinic

  Confrontations

  Circum/Stances

  Winterface

  Quarto

  Don’t Flinch

  Black Locket

  Generosity

  VI.

  You, Again

  Powers of Recuperation

  LATER POEMS (2010–2012)

  Itinerary

  For the Young Anarchists

  Fragments of an Opera

  Liberté

  Teethsucking Bird

  Undesigned

  Suspended Lines

  Tracings

  From Strata

  Endpapers

  Notes on the Poems

  Index of Titles and First Lines

  INTRODUCTION

  BY CLAUDIA RANKINE

  In answer to the question “Does poetry play a role in social change?” Adrienne Rich once answered:

  Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire…. [I]n poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.

  There are many great poets, but not all of them alter the ways in which we understand the world we live in; not all of them suggest that words can be held responsible. Remarkably, Adrienne Rich did this and continues to do this for generations of readers. In her Collected Poems 1950–2012 we have a chronicle of over a half century of what it means to risk the self in order to give the self.

  Rich’s desire for a transformative writing that would invent new ways to be, to see, and to speak drew me to her work in the early 1980s while I was a student at Williams College. Midway through a cold and snowy semester in the Berkshires, I read for the first time James Baldwin’s 1962 The Fire Next Time and two collections by Rich, her 1969 Leaflets and her 1971–1972 Diving into the Wreck. In Baldwin’s text I underlined the following: “Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.”

  Rich’s interrogation of the “guarding” of systems was the subject of everything she wrote in the years leading up to my first encounter with her work. Leaflets, Diving into the Wreck, and The Dream of a Common Language were all examples of her interrogation, as were her other works, all the way to her final poems in 2012. And though I did not have the critic Helen Vendler’s experience upon encountering Rich—“Four years after she published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving
wonder; someone my age was writing down my life…. Here was a poet who seemed, by a miracle, a twin: I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life”—I was immediately drawn to Rich’s interest in what echoes past the silences in a life that wasn’t necessarily my life.

  In my copy of Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” the faded yellow highlighter still remains recognizable on pages after more than thirty years: “Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” As a nineteen-year-old, I read in both Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months.

  Rich claimed that Baldwin was the “first writer I read who suggested that racism was poisonous to white as well as destructive to Black people” (“Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet” [1984]). It was Rich who suggested to me that silence, too, was poisonous and destructive to our social interactions and self-knowledge. Her understanding that the ethicacy of our personal relationships was dependent on the ethics of our political and cultural systems was demonstrated not only in her poetry but also in her essays, interviews, and in conversations like the extended one she conducted with the poet and essayist Audre Lorde.

  Despite the vital friendship between Lorde and Rich, or perhaps because of it, both poets were able to question their own everyday practices of collusion with the very systems that oppressed them. As self-identified lesbian feminists, they openly negotiated the difficulties of their very different racial and economic realities. Stunningly, they showed us that, if you listen closely enough, language “is no longer personal,” as Rich writes in “Meditations for a Savage Child,” but stains and is stained by the political.

  In the poem “Hunger” (1974–1975), which is dedicated to Audre Lorde, Rich writes, “I’m wondering / whether we even have what we think we have / … even our intimacies are rigged with terror. / Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open, / I stand convicted by all my convictions—you, too …” And as if in the form of an answer, Lorde wrote in “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” an essay published in 1981, “I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.”

  By my late twenties, the early 1990s, I was in graduate school at Columbia University and came across Rich’s recently published An Atlas of the Difficult World. I approached the volume thinking I knew what it would hold but found myself transported by Rich’s profound exploration of ethical loneliness. Rich called forward voices created in a precarious world. And though the term “ethical loneliness” would come to me years later from the work of the critic Jill Stauffer, I understood Rich to be drawing into her stanzas the voices of those who have been, in the words of Stauffer, “abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.”