ADRIENNE RICH

The Will to Change

Poems 1968-1970

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York · London

Adjusting type size may change line breaks. Landscape mode may help to preserve line breaks.

For David, Pablo and Jacob

What does not change/is the will to change

—Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers”

Contents

November 1968

Study of History

Planetarium

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

The Blue Ghazals

Pierrot Le Fou

Letters: March 1969

Pieces

Our Whole Life

Your Letter

“Stand up . . .”

The Stelae

Snow

The Will to Change

The Photograph of the Unmade Bed

Images for Godard

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Shooting Script

The Will to Change

November 1968

Stripped

you’re beginning to float free

up through the smoke of brushfires

and incinerators

the unleafed branches won’t hold you

nor the radar aerials

You’re what the autumn knew would happen

after the last collapse

of primary color

once the last absolutes were torn to pieces

you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you

until this moment

I know nothing about it

my ignorance of you amazes me

now that I watch you

starting to give yourself away

to the wind

1968

Study of History

Out there.         The mind of the river

as it might be you.

Lights         blotted by unseen hulls

repetitive, shapes passing

dull foam crusting the margin

barges sunk below the water-line with silence.

The scow, drudging on.

Lying in the dark, to think of you

and your harsh traffic

gulls pecking your rubbish         natural historians

mourning your lost purity

pleasure cruisers

witlessly careening you

but this

after all

is the narrows and after

all we have never entirely

known what was done to you upstream

what powers trepanned

which of your channels diverted

what rockface leaned to stare

in your upturned

defenseless

face.

1968

Planetarium

(Thinking of Caroline

Herschel, 1750–1848,

astronomer, sister of

William;  and others

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

a woman              ‘in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments

or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us

levitating into the night sky

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness

ribs chilled

in those spaces              of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and, absolutely certain’

from the mad webs of Uranisborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core

as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last

‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet         I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslateable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep         so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15

years to travel through me         And has

taken         I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images         for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.

1968

The Burning of Paper

Instead of Children

I was in danger of

verbalizing my moral

impulses out of

existence.

—Fr. Daniel Berrigan,

on trial in Baltimore.

1.   My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics text-book in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. “The burning of a book,” he says, “arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book.”

Back there: the library, walled

with green Britannicas

Looking again

in Dürer’s Complete Works

for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus

the Book of the Dead

the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue

I think, It is her color

and they take the book away

because I dream of her too often

love and fear in a house

knowledge of the oppressor

I know it hurts to burn

2.   To imagine a time of silence

or few words

a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks

traced by my hand

or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue         the slab of limestone

or reinforced concrete

fanatics and traders

dumped on this coast         wildgreen         clayred

that breathed once

in signals of smoke

sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor

this is the oppressor’s language

yet I need it to talk to you

3.   “People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.”

(the fracture of order

the repair of speech

to overcome this suffering)

4.   We lie under the sheet

after making love, speaking

of loneliness

relieved in a book

relived in a book

so on that page

the clot and fissure

of it appears

words of a man

in pain

a naked word

entering the clot

a hand grasping

through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us

has happened for centuries

we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy

outflung hand

beating bed

dryness of mouth

after panting

there are books that describe all this

and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house

there in that country

you find a temple

built eighteen hundred years ago

you enter without knowing

what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen

though the books tell everything

burn the texts         said Artaud

5.   I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.

1968

I Dream

I’m the Death of Orpheus

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown

under an arcade.

I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers

and those powers severely limited

by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

I am a woman in the prime of life

driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce

through a landscape of twilight and thorns.

A woman with a certain mission

which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.

A woman with the nerves of a panther

a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels

a woman feeling the fullness of her powers

at the precise moment when she must not use them

a woman sworn to lucidity

who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires

of these underground streets

her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind

on the wrong side of the mirror

1968

The Blue Ghazals

9/21/68

Violently asleep in the old house.

A clock stays awake all night ticking.

Turning, turning their bruised leaves

the trees stay awake all night in the wood.

Talk to me with your body through my dreams.

Tell me what we are going through.

The walls of the room are muttering,

old trees, old Utopians, arguing with the wind.

To float like a dead man in a sea of dreams

and half those dreams being dreamed by someone else.

Fifteen years of sleepwalking with you,

wading against the tide, and with the tide.

9/23/68

One day of equinoctial light after another,

moving ourselves through gauzes and fissures of that light.

Early and late I come and set myself against you,

your phallic fist knocking blindly at my door.

The dew is beaded like mercury on the coarsened grass,

the web of the spider is heavy as if with sweat.

Everything is yielding toward a foregone conclusion,

only we are rash enough to go on changing our lives.

An Ashanti woman tilts the flattened basin on her head

to let the water slide downward:         I am that woman and that

water.

9/28/68: i

A man, a woman, a city.

The city as object of love.

Anger and filth in the basement.

The furnace stoked and blazing.

A sexual heat on the pavements.

Trees erected like statues.

Eyes at the ends of avenues.

Yellow for hesitation.

I’m tired of walking your streets

he says, unable to leave her.

Air of dust and rising sparks,

the city burning her letters.

9/28/68: ii                                                    (For Wallace Stevens.

Ideas of order . . . Sinner of the Florida keys,

you were our poet of revolution all along.

A man isn’t what he seems but what he desires:

gaieties of anarchy drumming at the base of the skull.

Would this have left you cold, our scene, its wild parades,

the costumes, banners, incense, flowers, the immense marches?

Disorder is natural, these leaves absently blowing

in the drinking-fountain, filling the statue’s crevice.

The use of force in public architecture:

nothing, not even the honeycomb, manifests such control.

9/29/68                                                                   (For LeRoi Jones.

Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood,

half-sleepy, half-alert in that thicket of bitter roots.

Who doesn’t speak to me, who speaks to me more and more,

but from a face turned off, turned away, a light shut out.

Most of the old lecturers are inaudible or dead.

Prince of the night there are explosions in the hall.

The blackboard scribbled over with dead languages

is falling and killing our children.

Terribly far away I saw your mouth in the wild light:

it seemed to me you were shouting instructions to us all.

12/13/68

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

the edge of dark from the edge of dawn, your love is a lie.

If I thought of my words as changing minds,

hadn’t my mind also to suffer changes?

They measure fever, swab the blisters of the throat,

but the cells of thought go rioting on ignored.

It’s the inner ghost that suffers, little spirit

looking out wildly from the clouded pupils.

When will we lie clearheaded in our flesh again

with the cold edge of the night driving us close together?

12/20/68: i

There are days when I seem to have nothing

but these frayed packets, done up with rotting thread.

The shortest day of the year, let it be ours.

Let me give you something: a token for the subway.

(Refuse even

the most beloved old solutions.

That dead man wrote, grief ought to reach the lips.

You must believe I know before you can tell me.

A black run through the tunnelled winter, he and she,

together, touching, yet not side by side.

12/20/68: ii

Frost, burning. The city’s ill.

We gather like viruses.

The doctors are all on their yachts

watching the beautiful skin-divers.

The peasant mind of the Christian

transfixed on food at the year’s turning.

Thinking of marzipan

forget that revolutionary child.

Thought grown senile with sweetness.

You too may visit the Virgins.

In the clear air, hijacked planes

touch down at the forbidden island.

5/4/69

Pain made her conservative.

Where the matches touched her flesh, she wears a scar.

The police arrive at dawn

like death and childbirth.

City of accidents, your true map

is the tangling of all our lifelines.

The moment when a feeling enters the body

is political. This touch is political.

Sometimes I dream we are floating on water

hand-in-hand; and sinking without terror.

Pierrot Le Fou

1.

Suppose you stood facing

a wall

of photographs

from your unlived life

as you stand looking at these

stills from the unseen film?

Yourself against a wall

curiously stuccoed

Yourself in the doorway

of a kind of watchman’s hut

Yourself at a window

signalling to people

you haven’t met yet

Yourself in unfamiliar clothes

with the same eyes

2.

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

I speak the French language like a schoolgirl of the ’forties.

Those roads remind me of Beauce and the motorcycle.

We rode from Paris to Chartres in the March wind.

He said we should go to Spain but the wind defeated me.

France of the superhighways, I never knew you.

How much the body took in those days, and could take!

A naked lightbulb still simmers in my eyeballs.

In every hotel, I lived on the top floor.

3.

Suppose we had time

and no money

living by our wits

telling stories

which stories would you tell?

I would tell the story

of Pierrot Le Fou

who trusted

not a woman

but love itself

till his head blew off

not quite intentionally

I would tell all the stories I knew

in which people went wrong

but the nervous system

was right all along

4.

The island blistered our feet.

At first we mispronounced each others’ names.

All the leaves of the tree were scribbled with words.

There was a language there but no-one to speak it.

Sometimes each of us was alone.

At noon on the beach our shadows left us.

The net we twisted from memory kept on breaking.

The damaged canoe lay on the beach like a dead animal.

You started keeping a journal on a coconut shell.

5.

When I close my eyes

other films

have been there all along

a market shot:

bins of turnips, feet

of dead chickens

close-up: a black old woman

buying voodoo medicines

a figure of terrible faith

and I know her needs

Another film:

an empty room stacked with old films

I am kneeling on the floor

it is getting dark

they want to close the building

and I still haven’t found you

Scanning reel after reel

tundras in negative,

the Bowery

all those scenes

but the light is failing

and you are missing

from the footage of the march

the railway disaster

the snowbound village

even the shots of the island

miss you

yet you were there

6.

To record

in order to see

if you know how the story ends

why tell it

To record

in order to forget

the surface is always lucid

my shadows are under the skin

To record

in order to control

the eye of the camera

doesn’t weep tears of blood

To record

for that is what one does

climbing your stairs, over and over

I memorized the bare walls

This is my way of coming back

1969

Letters: March 1969

1.

Foreknown. The victor

sees the disaster through and through.

His soles grind rocksalt

from roads of the resistance.

He shoulders through rows of armored faces

he might have loved and lived among.

The victory carried like a corpse

from town to town

begins to crawl in the casket.

The summer swindled on

from town to town, our train

stopping and broiling on the rails

long enough to let on who we were.

The disaster sat up with us all night

drinking bottled water, eating fruit,

talking of the conditions that prevailed.

Outside along the railroad cut

they were singing for our death.

2.

Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

How little it takes

to restore composure.

White napkins, a tray

of napoleons and cherry tarts

compliments of the airline

which has flown us out of danger.

They are torturing the journalist we drank with

last night in the lounge

but we can’t be sure of that

here overlooking the runway

three hours and twenty minutes into another life.

If this is done for us

(and this is done for us)

if we are well men wearing bandages

for disguise

if we can choose our scene

stay out of earshot

break the roll and pour

from the clean carafe

if we can desert like soldiers

abjure like thieves

we may well purchase new virtues at the gate

of the other world.

3.

“I am up at sunrise

collecting data.

The reservoir burns green.

Darling, the knives they have on this block alone

would amaze you.

When they ask my profession I say

I’m a student of weapons systems.

The notes I’m putting together are purely

of sentimental value

my briefcase is I swear useless

to foreign powers, to the police

I am not given I say

to revealing my sources

to handing round copies

of my dossier for perusal.

The vulnerable go unarmed.

I myself walk the floor

a ruinously expensive Swiss hunter’s knife

exposed in my brain

eight blades, each one for a distinct purpose,

laid open as on the desk

of an importer or a fence.”

4.

Six months back

send carbons you said

but this winter’s dashed off in pencil

torn off the pad too fast

for those skills. In the dawn taxi

in the kitchen

burning the succotash

the more I love my life the more

I love you. In a time

of fear. In a city

of fears. In a life

without vacations the paisley fades

winter and summer in the sun

but the best time is now.

My sick friend writes: what’s love?

This life is nothing, Adrienne!

Her hands bled onto the sill.

She had that trick of reaching outward,

the pane was smashed but only

the calvinist northwind

spat in from the sea.

She’s a shot hero. A dying poet.

Even now, if we went for her—

but they’ve gone with rags and putty to fix the pane.

She stays in with her mirrors and anger.

I tear up answers

I once gave, postcards

from riot and famine go up on the walls

valentines stuck in the mirror

flame and curl, loyalties dwindle

the bleak light dries our tears

without relief. I keep coming back to you

in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and

I have no carbons. Prince of pity,

what eats out of your hand?

the rodent pain, electric

with exhaustion, mazed and shaken?

I’d have sucked the wound in your hand to sleep

but my lips were trembling.

Tell me how to bear myself,

how it’s done, the light kiss falling

accurately

on the cracked palm.

1969

Pieces

1. Breakpoint

The music of words

received as fact

The steps that wouldn’t hold us both

splintering in air

The self witheld in an urn

like ashes

To have loved you better than you loved yourself

—whoever you were, to have loved you—

And still to love but simply

as one of those faces on the street

2. Relevance

That erudition

how to confront it

The critics wrote answers

the questions were ours

A breast, a shoulder

chilled at waking

The cup of yoghurt

eaten at noon

and no explanations

The books we borrowed

trying to read each other’s minds

Paperbacks piling

on both sides of the fireplace

and piled beside the bed

What difference could it make

that those books came

out of unintelligible pain

as daylight out of the hours

when that light burned

atop the insurance tower

all night like the moon

3. Memory

Plugged-in to her body

he came the whole way

but it makes no difference

If not this then what

would fuse a connection

(All that burning intelligence about love

what can it matter

Falling in love on words

and ending in silence

with its double-meanings

Always falling and ending

because this world gives no room

to be what we dreamt of being

Are we, as he said

of the generation that forgets

the lightning-flash, the air-raid

and each other

4. Time and Place

Liquid mist burning off

along the highway

Slap of water

Light on shack boards

Hauling of garbage

early in the wet street

Always the same, wherever waking,

the old positions

assumed by the mind

and the new day forms

like a china cup

hard, cream-colored, unbreakable

even in our travels

5. Revelation

This morning: read Simone Weil

on the loss of grace

drank a glass of water

remembered the dream that woke me:

some one, some more than one

battering into my room

intent to kill me

I crying your name

its two syllables

ringing through sleep

knowing it vain

knowing

you slept unhearing

crying your name

like a spell

like signs executed

by the superstitious

who are the faithful of this world

1969

Our Whole Life

Our whole life a translation

the permissible fibs

and now a knot of lies

eating at itself to get undone

Words bitten thru words

meanings burnt-off like paint

under the blowtorch

All those dead letters

rendered into the oppressor’s language

Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts

like the Algerian

who has walked from his village, burning

his whole body a cloud of pain

and there are no words for this

except himself

1969

Your Letter

blinds me

like the light of that surf

you thrust your body in

for punishment

or the river of fiery fenders

and windshields

you pour yourself into

driving north to S.F.

on that coast of chrome and oil

I watch for any signal

the tremor of courage

in the seismograph

a flash

where I thought the glare

was steady, smogged & tame

1969

“Stand up . . .”

Stand up in my nightgown at the window

almost naked behind black glass

Off from the line of trees the road

beaten, bare, we walked

in the light of the bare, beaten moon.

Almost, you spoke to me. The road

swings past swampground

the soft spots of the earth

you might sink through into location

where their cameras are set up

the underground film-makers waiting to make their film

waiting for you

their cameras pivot toward your head and the film burns

but you’re not talking

If I am there you have forgotten my name

you think perhaps ‘a woman’

and you drift on, drifter, through the frames

of the movie they are making of this time.

A whole soundtrack of your silence

a whole film

of dark nights and darker rooms

and blank sheets of paper, bare . . .

1969

The Stelae

(For Arnold Rich.

Last night I met you in my sister’s house

risen from the dead

showing me your collection

You are almost at the point of giving things away

It’s the stelae on the walls I want

that I never saw before

You offer other objects

I have seen time and time again

I think you think you are giving me

something precious

The stelae are so unlike you

swart, indifferent, incised with signs

you have never deciphered

I never knew you had them

I wonder if you are giving them away

1969

Snow

when it comes down turning

itself in clusters before the flat

light of the shortest day

you see how all turns away

from us how we turn

into our shadows you can see

how we are tested

the individual crystal on the

black skirt of the maxi-coat

under the lens

was it a whole day or just a lifetime

spent studying crystals

on the fire escape while the ’Sixties

were running out

could you see

how the black ladder spun away from us

into whiteness

how over and over

a star became a tear

if no two are alike

then what are we doing

with these diagrams of loss

1969

The Will to Change

1.                                                                     (For L. D.,

dead 11/69.

That Chinese restaurant was a joke

with its repeating fountains

& chopsticks in tissue paper

The vodka was too sweet

the beancurd too hot

You came with your Egyptian hieroglyph

your angel’s smile

Almost the next day

as surely as if shot

you were thin air

At the risk of appearing ridiculous—

we take back this halfworld for you

and all whose murders accrue

past your death

2.                                                  (For Sandra Levinson.

Knocked down in the canefield

by a clumsily swung machete

she is helped to her feet

by Fidel

and snapped by photographers

the blonde Yanqui in jeans

We’re living through a time

that needs to be lived through us

(and in the morning papers

Bobby Seale, chalked

by the courtroom artist

defaced by the gag)

3.                                                                  (For D. J. L.

Beardless again, phoning

from a storefront in Yorkville

. . . we need a typewriter, a crib

& Michael’s number . . .

I swim to you thru dead

latitudes of fever

. . . accepting the discipline . . .

You mean your old freedom

to disappear—you miss that?

. . . but I can dig having lost it . . .

David, I could dig losing everything.

Knowing what you mean, to make that leap

bite into the fear, over & over

& survive. Hoarding my ‘liberty’

like a compulsive—more

than I can use up in a lifetime—

two dozen oranges in the refrigerator

for one American weekend

4.                                                                 (For A. H. C.

At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes

from the Feast of San Gennaro

gaze thru the dark

All night the A-train forages

under our bedroom

All night I dream of a man

black, gagged, shackled, coffined

in a courtroom where I am

passive, white & silent

though my mouth is free

All night I see his eyes

iridescent under torture

and hear the shuddering of the earth

as the trains tear us apart

5.

The cabdriver from the Bronx

screaming: ‘This city’s GOTTA die!’

dynamiting it hourly from his soul

as surely as any terrorist

Burning the bodies of the scum on welfare

ejaculating into the flames

(and, said Freud,

who welcomed it when it was done?)

the professors of the fact

that someone has suffered

seeking truth in a mist of librium

the artists talking of freedom

in their chains

1969–1970

The Photograph of the

Unmade Bed

Cruelty is rarely conscious

One slip of the tongue

one exposure

among so many

a thrust in the dark

to see if there’s pain there

I never asked you to explain

that act of violence

what dazed me was our ignorance

of our will to hurt each other

. . . . . .

In a flash I understand

how poems are unlike photographs

(the one saying    This could be

the other    This was

The image

isn’t responsible

for our uses of it

It is intentionless

A long strand of dark hair

in the washbasin

is innocent and yet

such things have done harm

. . . . . .

These snapshots taken by ghetto children

given for Christmas

Objects blurring into perceptions

No ‘art,’ only the faults

of the film, the faults of the time

Did mere indifference blister

these panes, eat these walls,

shrivel and scrub these trees—

mere indifference? I tell you

cruelty is rarely conscious

the done and the undone blur

into one photograph of failure

. . . . . .

This crust of bread we try to share

this name traced on a window

this word I paste together

like a child fumbling

with paste and scissors

this writing in the sky with smoke

this silence

this lettering chalked on the ruins

this alphabet of the dumb

this feather held to lips

that still breathe and are warm

1969

Images for Godard

1.    Language as city:: Wittgenstein

Driving to the limits

of the city of words

the superhighway streams

like a comic strip

to newer suburbs

casements of shockproof glass

where no one yet looks out

or toward the coast where even now

the squatters in their shacks

await eviction

When all conversation

becomes an interview

under duress

when we come to the limits

of the city

my face must have a meaning

2.    To know the extremes of light

I sit in this darkness

To see the present flashing

in a rearview mirror

blued in a plateglass pane

reddened in the reflection

of the red Triomphe

parked at the edge of the sea

the sea glittering in the sun

the swirls of nebula

in the espresso cup

raindrops, neon spectra

on a vinyl raincoat

3.    To love, to move perpetually

as the body changes

a dozen times a day

the temperature of the skin

the feeling of rise & fall

deadweight & buoyancy

the eye sunk inward

the eye bleeding with speech

(‘for that moment at least

I wás you—’)

To be stopped, to shoot the same scene

over & over

4.    At the end of Alphaville

she says I love you

and the film begins

that you’ve said you’d never make

because it’s impossible

‘things as difficult to show

as horror & war & sickness are’

meaning:         love,

to speak in the mouth

to touch the breast

for a woman

to know the sex of a man

That film begins here

yet you don’t show it

we leave the theatre

suffering from that

5.    Interior monologue of the poet:

the notes for the poem are the only poem

the mind collecting, devouring

all these destructibles

the unmade studio couch the air

shifting the abalone shells

the mind of the poet is the only poem

the poet is at the movies

dreaming the film-maker’s dream but differently

free in the dark as if asleep

free in the dusty beam of the projector

the mind of the poet is changing

the moment of change is the only poem

1970

A Valediction Forbidding

Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.

The grammar turned and attacked me.

Themes, written under duress.

Emptiness of the notations.

They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.

I want you to see this before I leave:

the experience of repetition as death

the failure of criticism to locate the pain

the poster in the bus that said:

my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.

These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.

When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

I could say: those mountains have a meaning

but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

1970

Shooting Script

PART I

11/69–2/70

1.

We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

Inside this shell, a tide waiting for someone to enter.

A monologue waiting for you to interrupt it.

A man wading into the surf. The dialogue of the rock with the

breaker.

The wave changed instantly by the rock; the rock changed by the

wave returning over and over.

The dialogue that lasts all night or a whole lifetime.

A conversation of sounds melting constantly into rhythms.

A shell waiting for you to listen.

A tide that ebbs and flows against a deserted continent.

A cycle whose rhythm begins to change the meanings of words.

A wheel of blinding waves of light, the spokes pulsing out from

where we hang together in the turning of an endless

conversation.

The meaning that searches for its word like a hermit crab.

A monologue that waits for one listener.

An ear filled with one sound only.

A shell penetrated by meaning.

2.

Ghazal V                                                                    (Adapted from

Mirza Ghalib)

Even when I thought I prayed, I was talking to myself; when I

found the door shut, I simply walked away.

We all accept Your claim to be unique; the stone lips, the

carved limbs, were never your true portrait.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that

refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

Now tell me your story till the blood drips from your lashes. Any

other version belongs to your folklore, or ours.

To see the Tigris in a water-drop . . . Either you were playing

games with me, or you never cared to learn the structure of my

language.

3.

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

Where we lay and breakfasted. The stains of tea. The squares

of winter light projected on the wool.

You, sleeping with closed windows. I, sleeping in the silver

nitrate burn of zero air.

Where it can snow, I’m at home; the crystals accumulating spell

out my story.

The cold encrustation thickening on the ledge.

The arrow-headed facts, accumulating, till a whole city is

taken over.

Midwinter and the loss of love, going comes before gone, over

and over the point is missed and still the blind will turns for

its target.

4.

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

In rafts they came over the sea; on the island they put up those

stones by methods we can only guess at.

If the vegetation grows as thick as this, how can we see what they

were seeing?

It is all being made clear, with bulldozers, at Angkor Wat

The verdure was a false mystery; the baring of the stones is no

solution for us now.

Defoliation progresses; concrete is poured, sheets of glass hauled

overland in huge trucks and at great cost.

Here we never travailed, never took off our shoes to walk the

final mile.

Come and look into this cellar-hole; this is the foundling of the

woods.

Humans lived here once; it became sacred only when they went

away.

5.

Of simple choice they are the villagers; their clothes come with

them like red clay roads they have been walking.

The sole of the foot is a map, the palm of the hand a letter,

learned by heart and worn close to the body.

They seemed strange to me, till I began to recall their dialect.

Poking the spade into the dry loam, listening for the tick of

broken pottery, hoarding the brown and black bits in a dented can.

Evenings, at the table, turning the findings out, pushing them

around with a finger, beginning to dream of fitting them together.

Hiding all this work from them, although they might have helped

me.

Going up at night, hiding the tin can in a closet, where the linoleum

lies in shatters on a back shelf.

Sleeping to dream of the unformed, the veil of water pouring over

the wet clay, the rhythms of choice, the lost methods.

6.

You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and

keep moving through the bad light.

At this time of year when faces turn aside, it is amazing that your

eyes are to be met.

A bad light is one like this, that flickers and diffuses itself along

the edge of a frontier.

No, I don’t invest you with anything; I am counting on your

weakness as much as on your strength.

This light eats away at the clarities I had fixed on; it moves up

like a rodent at the edge of the raked paths.

Your clarities may not reach me; but your attention will.

It is to know that I too have no mythic powers; it is to see the

liability of all my treasures.

You will have to see all this for a long time alone.

You are beside me like a wall; I touch you with my fingers and

keep trying to move through the bad light.

7.

Picking the wax to crumbs in the iron lip of the candelabrum.

Fingering down the thread of the maze where the green strand cuts

across the violet strand.

Picking apart the strands of pain; a warp of wool dipped in burning

wax.

When the flame shrinks to a blue bead, there is danger; the change

of light in a flickering situation.

Stretched on the loom the light expands; the smell of a smell of

burning.

When the change leaves you dark, when the wax cools in the socket,

when I thought I prayed, when I was talking to myself under the

cover of my darkness.

Someone who never said, “What do you feel?” someone who sat

across from me, taking the crumbs of wax as I picked them apart

and handed them over.

PART II

3–7/70

8.

(For Hugh Seidman.

A woman waking behind grimed blinds slatted across a courtyard

she never looks into.

Thinking of the force of a waterfall, the slash of cold air from the

thickest water of the falls, slicing the green and ochre afternoon

in which he turns his head and walks away.

Thinking of that place as an existence.

A woman reaching for the glass of water left all night on the bureau,

the half-done poem, the immediate relief.

Entering the poem as a method of leaving the room.

Entering the paper airplane of the poem, which somewhere before

its destination starts curling into ash and comes apart.

The woman is too heavy for the poem, she is a swolleness, a foot,

an arm, gone asleep, grown absurd and out of bounds.

Rooted to memory like a wedge in a block of wood; she takes the

pressure of her thought but cannot resist it.

You call this a poetry of false problems, the shotgun wedding of the

mind, the subversion of choice by language.

Instead of the alternative: to pull the sooty strings to set the

window bare to purge the room with light to feel the sun breaking

in on the courtyard and the steamheat smothering in the shut-off

pipes.

To feel existence as this time, this place, the pathos and force

of the lumps of snow gritted and melting in the unloved comers of

the courtyard.

9.

(Newsreel)

This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is

heavier, there were no hills of that size there.

But I find it impossible not to look for actual persons known

to me and not seen since; impossible not to look for myself.

The scenery angers me, I know there is something wrong, the sun

is too high, the grass too trampled, the peasants’ faces too broad,

and the main square of the capital had no arcades like those.

Yet the dead look right, and the roofs of the huts, and the crashed

fuselage burning among the ferns.

But this is not the war I came to see, buying my ticket, stumbling

through the darkness, finding my place among the sleepers and

masturbators in the dark.

I thought of seeing the General who cursed us, whose name they

gave to an expressway; I wanted to see the faces of the dead when

they were living.

Once I know they filmed us, back at the camp behind the lines,

taking showers under the trees and showing pictures of our girls.

Somewhere there is a film of the war we fought in, and it must

contain the flares, the souvenirs, the shadows of the netted brush,

the standing in line of the innocent, the hills that were not of

this size.

Somewhere my body goes taut under the deluge, somewhere I am

naked behind the lines, washing my body in the water of that war.

Someone has that war stored up in metal canisters, a memory he

cannot use, somewhere my innocence is proven with my guilt, but

this would not be the war I fought in.

10.

(For Valerie Glauber.

They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.

They come and drop their mementoes at the foot of your bed; their

feathers, ferns, fans, grasses from the western mountains.

They wait for you to unfold for them like a paper flower, a secret

springing open in a glass of water.

They believe your future has a history and that it is themselves.

They have family trees to plant for you, photographs of dead

children, old bracelets and rings they want to fasten onto you.

And, in spite of this, you live alone.

Your secret hangs in the open like Poe’s purloined letter; their

longing and their methods will never let them find it.

Your secret cries out in the dark and hushes; when they start out

of sleep they think you are innocent.

You hang among them like the icon in a Russian play; living your

own intenser life behind the lamp they light in front of you.

You are spilt here like mercury on a marble counter, liquefying

into many globes, each silvered like a planet caught in a lens.

You are a mirror lost in a brook, an eye reflecting a torrent of

reflections.

You are a letter written, folded, burnt to ash, and mailed in an

envelope to another continent.

11.

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

When you pull the embedded bones up from the soil, the flies

collect again.

The pelvis, the open archway, staring at me like an eye.

In the desert these bones would be burnt white; a green bloom grows

on them in the woods.

Did she break her leg or die of poison?

What was it like when the scavengers came?

So many questions unanswered, yet the statement is here and clear.

With what joy you handled the skull, set back the teeth spilt in the

grass, hinged back the jaw on the jaw.

With what joy we left the woods, swinging our sticks, miming the

speech of noble savages, of the fathers of our country, bursting

into the full sun of the uncut field.

12.

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

We walked in the wholesale district: closed warehouses, windows,

steeped in sun.

I said: those cloths are very old.    You said: they have lain in

that window a long time.

When the skeletons of the projects shut off the sunset, when the

sense of the Hudson leaves us, when only by loss of light in the east

do I know that I am living in the west.

When I give up being paraphrased, when I let go, when the

beautiful solutions in their crystal flasks have dried up in the sun,

when the lightbulb bursts on lighting, when the dead bulb rattles

like a seed-pod.

Those cloths are very old, they are mummies’ cloths, they have lain

in graves, they were not intended to be sold, the tragedy of this

mistake will soon be clear.

Vacillant needles of Manhattan, describing hour & weather; buying

these descriptions at the cost of missing every other point.

13.

We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to

me to put out in a boat, not on a night like this.

Still, it was an instrument, and I had pledged myself to try any

instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction

of incompetence.

A long time I was simply learning to handle the skiff; I had no

special training and my own training was against me.

I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.

In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.

I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each

one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old days.

14.

Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats;

ashes spilled on white formica.

The death-col viewed through power-glasses; the cube of ice melting

on stainless steel.

Whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you

came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.

Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the

web of cracks filtering across the plaster.

To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the

initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.

To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the

lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.

To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the

glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is.

To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map

of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages.

To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in

your old neighborhood.

By Adrienne Rich

TIME’S POWER

BLOOD, BREAD, AND POETRY:

Selected Prose 1979–1985

OF WOMAN BORN:

Tenth Anniversary Edition

YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE

THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME:

Poems Selected and New 1950–1984

SOURCES

A WILD PATIENCE HAS TAKEN ME THIS FAR

ON LIES, SECRETS, AND SILENCE:

Selected Prose 1966–1978

THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE

TWENY-ONE LOVE POEMS

OF WOMAN BORN: Motherhood

as Experience and Institution

POEMS: SELECTED AND NEW, 1950–1974

DIVING INTO THE WRECK

THE WILL TO CHANCE

LEAFLETS

NECESSITIES OF LIFE

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS

A CHANGE OF WORLD

Adrienne Rich’s first book, A Change of World, was published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1951. Her second book, The Diamond Cutters, won the Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America. Necessities of Life, published in 1966, was a National Book Award finalist. Rich has held two Guggenheim Fellowships, a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, and the Hurst Professorship of Creative Literature. She is also the author of Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1967), Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968 (1969), The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970 (1971), and Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1970–1972.

Some of these poems have appeared in the following periodicals: “November 1968,” “Study of History,” and “I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus” in Colloquy; “Planetarium” in Aphra and Inside Outer Space; “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” in Caterpillar; “Pierrot Le Fou” in Field; “Letters: March 1969” in Harper’s Magazine; “Pieces” in Salmagundi; “Our Whole Life” in The New Republic; “The Stelae” in New York Quarterly; “The Photograph of the Unmade Bed” in First Issue, No. 4.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

Copyright © 1971 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 78-146842

ISBN 978-0-393-04361-7

ISBN 978-0-393-34816-3 (e-book)

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Contents

November 1968

Study of History

Planetarium

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

The Blue Ghazals

Pierrot Le Fou

Letters: March 1969

Pieces

Our Whole Life

Your Letter

“Stand up . . .”

The Stelae

Snow

The Will to Change

The Photograph of the Unmade Bed

Images for Godard

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

Shooting Script

Also by Adrienne Rich

About the Author

Copyright