ALSO BY ADRIENNE RICH

Poetry & Commitment: An Essay

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2000

Fox: Poems 1998–2000

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

Collected Early Poems 1950–1970

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985

Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems

Sources

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977

Twenty-one Love Poems

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972

The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970

Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968

Necessities of Life

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems: 1954–1962

The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems

A Change of World

TELEPHONE RINGING

IN THE

LABYRINTH

POEMS

2004–2006

ADRIENNE RICH

W. W. Norton & Company

New York • London

TO VIEW TEXT WITH LINE ENDINGS AS POET INTENDED,

PLEASE SET FONT SIZE TO THE SMALLEST SIZE ON YOUR DEVICE.

FOR

Aijaz Ahmad

AND

IN MEMORY OF

F. O. Matthiessen,

1902–1950

Poetry isn’t easy to come by.

You have to write it like you owe a debt to the world.

In that way poetry is how the world comes to be in you.

—ALAN DAVIES

Poetry is not self-expresssion, the I is a dramatic I.

—MICHAEL S. HARPER,

QUOTING STERLING A. BROWN

To which I would add: and so, unless

otherwise indicated, is the You.

—A.R.

CONTENTS

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

Notes on the Poems

Acknowledgments

I

VOYAGE TO THE DENOUEMENT

A child’s hand smears a wall   the reproof is bitter

wall contrives to linger   child, punisher, gone in smoke

An artisan lays on hues:   lemon, saffron, gold

stare hard before you start covering the whole room

Inside the thigh a sweet mole   on the balding

skull an irregular island   what comes next

After the burnt forests   silhouettes wade

liquid hibiscus air

Velvet rubs down to scrim   iron utensils

discolor unseasoned

Secret codes of skin and hair

go dim   left from the light too long

Because my wish was to have things simpler

than they were   memory too became

a smudge   sediment from a hand

repeatedly lying on the same surface

Call it a willful optimism

from when old ownerships unpeeled    curled out

into the still nameless   new imperium   Call it

haplessness of a creature   not yet ready

for her world-citizen’s papers

(Across the schoolroom mural   bravely

small ships did under sail traverse great oceans)

Rain rededicates the exhumed

African burial ground

traffic lashes its edges

the city a scar a fragment floating

on tidal dissolution

The opal on my finger

fiercely flashed till the hour it started to crumble

2004

CALIBRATIONS

She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl

where she will sit on beds and sing

ballads from when Romany

roamed Spain

. . .

A prosthetic hand calibrates perfectly

the stem of a glass

or how to stroke a face

is this how far we have come

to make love easy

Ghost limbs go into spasm in the night

You come back from war with the body you have

. . .

What you can’t bear

carry endure lift

you’ll have to drag

it’ll come with you the ghostlimb

the shadow   blind

echo of your body spectre of your soul

. . .

Let’s not talk yet of making love

nor of ingenious devices

replacing touch

And this is not theoretical:

A poem with calipers to hold a heart

so it will want to go on beating

2004

SKELETON KEY

In the marina an allegro creaking

boats on the tide

each with its own sway

rise and fall

acceptance and refusal

La Barqueta, My Pelican

barometer in the body

rising and falling

. . .

A small wound, swallow-shaped, on my wrist

ripped by a thorn

exacerbated by ash and salt

And this is how I came to be

protector of the private

and enemy of the personal

. . .

Then I slept, and had a dream

No more

No màs

From now on, only

reason’s drugged and dreamless sleep

. . .

Creeps down the rockface   shadow cast

from an opposite crag exactly at that moment

you needed light on the trail   These are the shortening days

you forgot about   bent on your own design

. . .

Cut me a skeleton key

to that other time, that city

talk starting up, deals and poetry

Tense with elation, exiles

walking old neighborhoods

calm journeys of streetcars

revived boldness of cats

locked eyes of couples

music playing full blast again

Exhuming the dead   Their questions

2004

WALLPAPER

1

A room papered with clippings:

newsprint in bulging patches

none of them mentions our names

gone from that history then   O red

kite snarled in a cloud

small plane melted in fog:   no matter:

I worked to keep it current

and meaningful:   a job of living I thought

history as wallpaper

urgently selected clipped and pasted

but the room itself   nowhere

gone the address   the house

golden-oak banisters zigzagging

upward, stained glass on the landings

streaked porcelain in the bathrooms

loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried

up to secrete the rash imagination

of a time to come

What we said then, our breath   remains

otherwhere:   in me   in you

2

Sonata for Unaccompanied Minor

Fugitive Variations

discs we played over and over

on the one-armed phonograph

Childish we were in our adoration

of the dead composer

who’d ignored the weather signs

trying to cross the Andes

stupidly   I’d say now

and you’d agree   seasoned

as we are   working stretched

weeks   eating food bought

with ordinary grudging wages

keeping up with rent, utilities

a job of living as I said

3

Clocks are set back   quick dark

snow filters past my lashes

this is the common ground

white-crusted sidewalks   windshield wipers

licking, creaking

to and fro   to and fro

If the word gets out if the word

escapes if the word

flies if it dies

it has its way of coming back

The handwritings on the walls

are vast and coded

the music blizzards past

2004

IN PLAIN SIGHT

My neighbor moving

in a doorframe   moment’s

reach of her hand   then

withdrawn   As from some old

guilty pleasure

Smile etched like a scar

which must be borne

Smile

in a photograph taken against one’s will

Her son up on a ladder stringing

along the gutter

electric icicles in a temperate zone

If the suffering hidden in plain sight

is of her past her future

or the thin-ice present where

we’re balancing here

or how she sees it

I can’t presume

. . . Ice-thin.   Cold and precarious

the land I live in and have argued not to leave

Cold on the verge of crease

crack without notice

ice-green disjuncture   treasoning us

to flounder cursing each other

Cold and grotesque the sex

the grimaces the grab

A privilege   you say

to live here   A luxury

Everyone still wants to come here!

You want a christmas card, a greeting

to tide us over

with pictures of the children

then you demand a valentine

an easterlily   anything for the grab

a mothersday menu   wedding invitation

It’s not as in a museum that I

observe

and mark in every Face I meet

under crazed surfaces

traces of feeling   locked in shadow

Not as in a museum of history

do I pace here   nor as one who in a show

of bland paintings shrugs and walks on    I gaze

through faces   not as an X-ray

nor

as paparazzo shooting

the compromised celebrity

nor archaeologist filming

the looted site

nor as the lover tearing out of its frame

the snapshot to be held to a flame

but as if a mirror

forced to reflect a room

the figures

standing   the figures crouching

2004

BEHIND THE MOTEL

A man lies under a car half bare

a child plays bullfight with a torn cloth

hemlocks grieve in wraps of mist

a woman talks on the phone, looks in a mirror

fiddling with the metal pull of a drawer

She has seen her world wiped clean, the cloth

that wiped it disintegrate in mist

or dying breath on the skin of a mirror

She has felt her life close like a drawer

has awoken somewhere else, bare

He feels his skin as if it were mist

as if his face would show in no mirror

He needs some bolts he left in a vanished drawer

crawls out into the hemlocked world with his bare

hands, wipes his wrench on an oil-soaked cloth

stares at the woman talking into a mirror

who has shut the phone into the drawer

while over and over with a torn cloth

at the edge of hemlocks behind the bare

motel a child taunts a horned beast made from mist

2004

PIANO MÉLANCOLIQUE (extraits)

par Élise Turcotte

N’emporte rien avec toi.

Essayons de croire

qu’il n’y a rien dans mes poumons.

Qu’aucune maladie ne noircit

tes yeux.

Que je t’écris de la mangrove

pour te parler des palétuviers

qui sont les personnages

les plus mystérieux que j’aie vu.

Fantomatique, comme les

arbres, je reviens aux paysages.

Vapeurs et reflets.

Et petites racines aériennes

fixées au bas de ma robe.

Je me décris comme un animal

à plumes.

Je décris. Tu regardes.

Tandis que poussent mes plumes.

La nuit, tu cherches un motif fragile,

un relief aussi précis qu’un visage

aimé.

Des insectes occupent la chapelle cachée

sous le sable.

Beaucoup d’années ont passé

jusqu’ici.

C’est la nuit qui parle,

dis-tu.

Mon poème sans mot.

Ma fuite en terre sauvage.

Le corps est léger quand

il est pris pour ce qu’il est.

Composé de murs et de

fenêtres.

Prêt à brûler.

Avec des petits drapeaux

flottant au centre.

Je te caresse avec le secours

du vide.

Une ode à la survie.

Un dictionnaire d’herbes folles.

Pour guérir, nous sommes prêts

à tout.

MELANCHOLY PIANO (extracts)

from the French of Élise Turcotte

Take nothing with you.

Let’s try believing

there’s nothing in my lungs.

That no sickness clouds

your eyes.

That I write you from the swamp

to tell you about the mangroves

the most mysterious

presences I’ve seen.

Spectral as the

trees, I return to landscape.

Fumes and reflections.

And little airy roots

stuck to the hem of my skirt.

I describe myself as a feathered

animal.

I describe.   You watch.

While my plumes grow.

Nights, you search for a fragile cause

set in relief, precise as a loved

face.

Insects dwell in the chapel hidden

in sand.

Many years have gone by

until this moment.

Night is speaking

you say.

My poem without words.

My flight into wild country.

The body is light when

taken for what it is.

Formed of walls and

windows.

Ready to burn.

With little flags

fluttering   in the center.

I touch you with the help

of the void.

An ode to survival.

A dictionary of wild grasses.

We’ll do anything

for a cure.

2004

II

ARCHAIC

Cold wit leaves me cold

this time of the world   Multifoliate disorders

straiten my gait   Minuets don’t become me

Been wanting to get out   see the sights

but the exits are slick with people

going somewhere fast

every one with a shared past

and a mot juste   And me so out of step

with my late-night staircase inspirations   my

utopian slant

Still, I’m alive here

in this village drawn in a tightening noose

of ramps and cloverleafs

but the old directions I drew up

for you

are obsolete

Here’s how

to get to me

I wrote

Don’t misconstrue the distance

take along something for the road

everything might be closed

this isn’t a modern place

You arrived starving at midnight

I gave you warmed-up food

poured tumblers of brandy

put on Les Barricades Mystérieuses

—the only jazz in the house

We talked for hours   of barricades

lesser and greater sorrows

ended up laughing in the thicksilver

birdstruck light

2005

LONG AFTER STEVENS

A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains

more modern than the will

to be modern   The mountain’s profile

in undefiled snow disdains

definitions of poetry   It was always

indefinite, task and destruction

the laser eye of the poet   her blind eye

her moment-stricken eye   her unblinking eye

She had to get down from the blocked train

lick snow from bare cupped hands

taste what had soared into that air

—local cinders, steam of the fast machine

clear her palate with a breath   distinguish

through tumbling whiteness   figures

frozen   figures advancing

weapons at the ready

for the new password

She had to feel her tongue

freeze and burn at once

instrument searching, probing

toward a foreign tongue

2005

IMPROVISATION ON LINES

FROM EDWIN MUIR’S

“VARIATIONS ON A TIME THEME”

Packed in my skin from head to toe

Is one I know and do not know

He never speaks to me yet is at home

More snug than embryo in the womb . . .

His name’s Indifference

Nothing offending he is all offence . . .

Can note with a lack-lustre eye

Victim and murderer go by . . .

If I could drive this demon out

I’d put all Time’s display to rout . . .

Or so I dream when at my door

I hear my Soul, my Visitor.

He comes but seldom, and I cannot tell

If he’s myself or one who loves me well

And comes in pity, for he pities all . . .

Victim and murderer . . . Vision’s

bloodshot wandering eye engages and

the whetted tool moves toward the hand

scrapes down an impassive sky   debrides

the panicked face   erases or redresses

with understrokes and slashes

in smeared roughed-over surfaces

false moves bad guesses

pausing to gauge its own

guilty innocence, desire

to make it clear yet leave the field

still dark and dialectical

This is unpitying yet not cold

—And Muir I wonder, standing under

the bruised eye-socket of late-winter sun

about your circling double-bind

between indifference and pit

your dream of history as Eden’s

loss, all else as repetition

—Wonder at your old opposite

number, Hugh MacDiarmid

his populated outraged joy

his ear for Lenin and for Rilke

for the particular and vast

the thistle’s bony elegance

the just, the wild, the urge, the cry for

what must change what be demolished

what secreted for the future

bardic or technological

together dialectical

2005–2006

RHYME

Walking by the fence but the house

not there

going to the river but the

river looking spare

bones of the river spread out

everywhere

O tell me this is home

Crossing the bridge but

some planks not there

looking at the shore but only

getting back the glare

dare you trust the river when there’s

no water there

O tell me is this home

Getting into town seeing

nobody I know

folks standing around

nowhere to go

staring into the air like

they saw a show

O tell me was this my home

Come to the railroad no train

on the tracks

switchman in his shanty

with a great big axe

so what happened here so what

are the facts

So tell me where is my home

2005

HOTEL

I dreamed the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time

It was in New York had been there a long time

Finnish sea-captains had stayed there in their time

It had fallen on one then another bad time

Now restored it wished to be or seem of the olden time

The Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time

There was a perpendicular lighted sign along its spine:

THE FINNISH HOTEL and on the desk aligned

two lamps like white globes and a blond

wood lounge with curved chairs and a bar beyond

serving a clear icy liquor of which the captains had been fond

reputedly in the olden time

In the Finnish Hotel I slept on a mattress stuffed with straw

after drinking with a Finnish captain who regarded me with awe

saying, Woman who could put away that much I never saw

but I did not lie with him on the mattress, his major flaw

being he was a phantom of the olden time

and I a woman still almost in my prime

dreaming the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in the olden time

2005

THREE ELEGIES

i.  LATE STYLE

Propped on elbow in stony light

Green lawns of entitlement

out the window you can neither

open nor close

man crouched in den flung trembling

back on failed gifts

lapsed desire   A falling

star   Dim, trapped

in the narrow place of fame

And beneath the skin of boredom

indecipherable fear

ii.  AS EVER

As ever, death.   Whenever, where.   But it’s

the drawn-together life we’re finally

muted by.   Must stand, regard as whole

what was still partial   still

under revision.   So it felt, so we thought.

Then to hear sweep

the scythe on grass

still witherless and sweet

iii.  FALLEN FIGURE

The stone walls will recede and the needs that laid them

scar of winter sun stretch low

behind the advancing junipers

darkness rise up from the whitening pond

Crusted silver your breath in this ditch

the pitchfork in your hand

still stuck to your hand

The northern lights

will float, probe, vacillate

the yellow eye

of the snowplow you used to drive

will seek and find you

2005

HUBBLE PHOTOGRAPHS: AFTER SAPPHO

It should be the most desired sight of all

the person with whom you hope to live and die

walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight

Should be yet I say there is something

more desirable:   the ex-stasis of galaxies

so out from us there’s no vocabulary

but mathematics and optics

equations letting sight pierce through time

into liberations, lacerations of light and dust

exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous,

gorgeous

beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream

beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death

or life, rage

for order, rage for destruction

—beyond this love which stirs

the air every time she walks into the room

These impersonae, however we call them

won’t invade us as on movie screens

they are so old, so new, we are not to them

we look at them or don’t from within the milky gauze

of our tilted gazing

but they don’t look back and we cannot hurt them

for Jack Litewka

2005

THIS IS NOT THE ROOM

of polished tables lit with medalled

torsos bent toward microphones

where ears lean hands scribble

“working the dark side”

—glazed eye meeting frozen eye—

This is not the room where tears down carven

cheeks track rivulets in the scars

left by the gouging tool

where wood itself is weeping

where the ancient painted eye speaks to the living eye

This is the room

where truth scrubs around the pedestal of the toilet

flings her rag into the bucket

straightens up   spits at the mirror

2005

UNKNOWN QUANTITY

Spring nights you pillow your head on a sack

of rich compost   Charcoal, your hair

sheds sparks through your muttered dreams

Deep is your sleep in the starless dark

and you wake in your live skin to show me

a tulip   Not the prizewinning Queen of the Night

furled in her jade wrappings

but the Prince of Darkness, the not-yet, the X

crouched in his pale bulb

held out in the palm of your hand

Shall we bury him wait and see what happens

will there be time for waiting and to see

2005

TACTILE VALUE

from crush and splinter

death in the market

jeering robotic

dry-ice disrupt

to conjure this:

perishing

persistent script

scratched-up smeared

and torn

let hair, nail cuttings

nourish the vine and fig tree

let man, woman

eat, be sheltered

. . .

Marx the physician laid his ear

on the arhythmic heart

felt the belly

diagnosed the pain

did not precisely write

of lips roaming damp skin

hand plunged in hair   bed-laughter

mouth clasping mouth

(what we light with this coalspark

living instantly in us

if it continue

2005–2006

MIDNIGHT, THE SAME DAY

i

When the sun seals my eyes the emblem

of failure will still be standing

motionless at this intersection

between family restaurant

and medical clinic

wearing his cardboard necklace lettered

H ARD LU CK

until his sister

the Fury of reparations

descends

curdling the air in whirlwind

tears it from his neck

picks him up and hurls on

ii

Try to rest now, says a voice.

Another:   Give yourself time.

But rest is no act of will

and gifts to the self come back unopened

Milk will boil down in the iron pot

blistering into black sugar,

scalded vinegar lift

crispened layers

pages of a codex

in a library blown away

2005

EVEN THEN MAYBE

Not spent   those bloodshot friendships   those

soul-marriages sealed and torn

those smiles of pain

I told her a mouthful

I shut my mouth against him

Throat thick with tears

how words sound when you swallow

—and under the roof

of the mouth   long stroke

reaching from the tongue’s root

No, I was not living with her at the time

At the time I was not living

with him, at the time we were living together

I was living with neither of them

—was dwelling you could say

But as for living at that time

we were all living together with many others

for whom living was precisely the question

Haven’t seen evenings like that since

vesuvian emerald to brass dissolving

—a sentence you’d waited for

taken back half-spoken—

Luxury even then maybe

evenings like those

2005

DIRECTOR’S NOTES

You don’t want a harsh outcry here

not to violate the beauty yet

dawn unveiling ochre village

but to show coercion

within that beauty, endurance required

Begin with girl

pulling hand over hand on chain

only sound drag and creak

in time it becomes monotonous

then must begin sense of unease produced by monotony

repetitive motion, repetitive sound

resistance, irritation

increasing for the viewers

sense of what are they here for, anyway

dislike of the whole thing how boring to watch

(they aren’t used to duration

this was a test)

Keep that dislike that boredom as a value

also as risk

so when bucket finally tinks at rim

they breathe a sigh, not so much relief

as finally grasping

what all this was for

dissolve as she dips from bucket

2005

REREADING THE DEAD LECTURER

Overthrow.   And make new.

An idea.   And we felt it.

A meaning.   And we caught it

as the dimensions spread, gathering

in pre-utopian basements   figured shadows

scrawled with smoke and music.

Shed the dead hand,

let sound be sense.   A world

echoing everywhere, Fanon, Freire, thin pamphlets lining

raincoat pockets, poetry on walls, damp purple mimeos cranking

—the feeling of an idea.   An idea of feeling.

That love could be so resolute

And the past?   Overthrow of systems, forms

could not overthrow the past

nor our

neglect of consequences.

Nor that cold will we misnamed.

There were consequences.   A world

repeating everywhere:   the obliterations.

What’s surreal, hyperreal, virtual,

what’s poetry what’s verse what’s new.   What is

a political art.   If we

(who?) ever were conned

into mere definitions.

If we

accept

(book of a soul contending

2005

III

LETTERS CENSORED

SHREDDED

RETURNED TO SENDER

OR JUDGED UNFIT TO SEND

Unless in quotation marks (for which see Notes on the Poems), the letter fragments are written by various imaginary persons.

“We must prevent this mind from functioning . . .”: words of the prosecutor sentencing Antonio Gramsci to prison, June 2, 1928.

—Could you see me laboring over this

right arm in sling, typing left-handed with one finger—

[On a scale of one to ten what is your pain today]

—shall I measure the split atoms

of pleasure flying outward from the core—

—To think of her naked every day unfreezes me—

Banditry, rapes, burning the woods

“a kind of primitive class struggle

with no lasting or effective results”

—The bakers strike, the needleworkers strike, the mechanics strike, the miners strike

the great machine coughs out the pieces and hurtles on—

—then there are days all thought comes down to sound:

Rust.   August.   Mattress.   Must.

Chains…

—when consciousness + sensation feels like/ = suffering—

—the people, yes,  as yet unformed—deformed—no: disinformed—

—What’s realistic fantasy?—Call it hope—

—heard your voice on the news tonight, its minor key

your old-fashioned mindfulness—could have loved you again—

—Autumn invades my body, anger

wrapped in forgiving sunlight, fear of the cold—

—Words gather like flies above this carcass of meaning—

“this void, this vacuum”

—You think you are helpless because you are empty-handed

of concepts that could become your strength—

—we’re told it’s almost over, but we see no sign of it yet—

“caught between a feeling of immense tenderness for you

which seems . . . a weakness

that could only be consoled

by an immediate physical caress . . .”

[We must prevent this mind from functioning for twenty years]

“. . . and these inadequate, cold and colorless words”

—What I meant to write, belov’d critic, then struck it out

thinking you might accuse me of

whatever you would:

I wanted a sensual materialism to utter pleasure

Something beyond a cry that could sound like a groan—

—Vocalizing forbidden syllables—

—our mythologies choke us, we have enthralled ourselves—

[Writing like this for the censors

but I won’t hide behind words]

“my body cells revolve in unison

with the whole universe

The cycle of the seasons, the progression of the solstices

and equinoxes

I feel them as flesh of my flesh

and under the snow the first violets are already trembling

In short, time has seemed to me a thing of flesh

ever since space

ceased to exist for me”

—History = bodies in time—

or, in your language:

H = T

b

—to think of the one asleep

in that field beside the chimney

of the burnt-out house

a thing of flesh, exhausted—

—this flash is all we know . . . . can we shut our eyes to it . . . ?—

—more and more I dread futility—

“The struggle, whose normal external expressions

have been choked,

attaches itself to the structure

of the old class like a destructive gangrene . . .

it takes on morbid forms of mysticism,

sensualism, moral indifference,

physical and psychic pathological depravations . . .

The old structure does not contain and is unable

to satisfy the new needs . . .”

—Trying to hold an inner focus while hoarse laughter

ricochets from the guardroom—

—liquefaction  is a word I might use for how I would take you—

—the daunted river finally

undammed?—

[prevent this mind]

2005

IV

IF/AS THOUGH

you’d spin out on your pirate platter

chords I’d receive on my crystal set

blues purpling burgundy goblets

Lorca’s piano spuming up champagne flutes

could drop over any night at will

with that bottle of Oregon Pinot to watch Alexander Nevsky

If no curfews no blackouts no

no-fly lists no profiling racial genital mental

If all necessary illicits blew in

like time-release capsules or spores in the mulch

up-rising as morels, creviced and wild-delicious   If

Gerard Manley Hopkins were here to make welsh rarebit

reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland to Hart Crane in his high tenor

guessing him captive audience to sprung rhythm   as we in lóst lóve

sequences   hearing it

skim uncurfewed, uncowled

pelicans over spindrift beating agnostic wings

for Ed Pavlic

2006

TIME EXPOSURES

i

Glance into glittering moisture

webbed in lashes   unshed tears

I’d guess as yours

Known odor inhaled years later

in a brief social kiss   sudden conjuncture

soap, sweat, breath, hair   other embraces

diffused   once, again, time’s exhilarations

ii

Is there a doctor in the house

who in his plain mindful way

cared for his patients through

pain rain and snow

who at each and every grave

side knew

what could be done

he’d done

And where have all the patients gone

who wanted (more than one)

a tending hand

across the forehead   at the end

And what’s the house?

iii

They’d say she was humorless

didn’t go to the parties

giggle   show white teeth

So would suspend her in

their drained

definitions

Her body had nipples, eyes

a tongue and other parts

mirthful

obscene

which rose from love   quite often

hilarious into daylight

even forgetting why

iv

When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking

into the long history they were made for running

caught the train you missed sought you eye-level

at the next station   You having run the whole way

to seize my face between your hands   your kind

of victory or benediction   then

we swerved down-tunnel

in separate cars   What is it to

catch yourself mirror-twinned

in an underwater window   what

about speed   matching

technology and desire   getting off

at the last stop:   dispersed

v

You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog

ocean in its shaking

looks back at you with a blurred eye

Who’s that reflected

naked and sundered

reaching a hand

Go

down to the beach, walk in the wind

Pick up the washed-in shell

at your foot

Shell castle built on sand

your body and what’s your soul?

Is there a ghost-in-waiting?

time to bring that one in

2006

THE UNIVERSITY REOPENS

AS THE FLOODS RECEDE

Should blue air in its purity let you disdain

the stink of artificial pine

the gaunt architecture

of cheap political solutions

if there are philosophies to argue

the moment when you would

or wouldn’t spring to shield

a friend’s body or jump

into scummed waters after

a stranger caught submerging

or walk off to your parked

car your sandwich your possible orange

if theories rage or dance

about this if in the event   any

can be sure who did

or did not act on principle or impulse

and what’s most virtuous

can we not be nodding smiling

taking down notes like this

and of all places

in a place like this

I’ll work with you on this bad matter   I can

but won’t give you the time of day

if you think it’s hypothetical

2006

VIA INSOMNIA

Called up in sleep:   your voice:

I don’t know where I am . . .

A hand, mine, stroking a white fur surface

you as a white fur hat unstitched, outspread

white as your cold brancusian marble head

what animal’s pelt resembles you?

but these are my navigations:   you don’t know where you are

Is this how it is to be newly dead?   unbelieving

the personal soul, electricity unsheathing

from the cortex, light-waves fleeing

into the black universe

to lie awake half-sleeping, wondering

Where, when will I sleep

for Tory Dent

2006

A BURNING KANGAROO

leaping forward   escaping

out of rock reamed

on sky

in violet shadow

leaping   scorched to the skin

toward water

(none for miles)

Who did

(and can you see

this thing

not as a dream

a kangaroo

and not in profile either

Frontal

in flame   no halo

no aura   burning meat in movement

Can

you see with me

(unverified

otherwise

(whoever   did this thing

2006

EVER, AGAIN

Mockingbird shouts Escape! Escape!

and would I could   I’d

fly, drive back to that house

up the long hill between queen

anne’s lace and common daisyface

shoulder open stuck door

run springwater from kitchen

tap   drench tongue

palate and throat

throw window sashes up screens down

breathe in    mown grass

pine-needle heat

manure, lilac   unpack

brown sacks from the store:

ground meat, buns, tomatoes, one

big onion, milk and orange juice

iceberg lettuce, ranch dressing

potato chips, dill pickles

the Caledonian-Record

Portuguese rosé in round-hipped flask

open the box of newspapers by the stove

reread:   (Vietnam Vietnam)

Set again on the table

the Olivetti, the stack

of rough yellow typing paper

mark the crashed instant

of one summer’s mosquito

on a bedroom door

voices of boys outside

proclaiming twilight and hunger

Pour iced vodka into a shotglass

get food on the table

sitting with those wild heads

over hamburgers, fireflies, music

staying up late with the typewriter

falling asleep with the dead

2006

V

DRAFT #2006

i

Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions.

(What were you there for? Why did you walk out? What

would have made you stay? Why wouldn’t you listen?)

—Couldn’t you show us what you meant, can’t we get it right

this time? Can’t you put it another way?—

(You were looking for openings where they’d been walled up—)

—But you were supposed to be our teacher—

(One-armed, I was trying to get you, one by one, out of that

cellar.   It wasn’t enough)

ii

Dreamfaces blurring horrorlands: border of poetry.

Ebb tide sucks out clinging rockpool creatures, no swimming

back into sleep.

Clockface says too early, body prideful and humble shambles

into another day, reclaiming itself piecemeal in private ritual acts.

Reassembling the anagram scattered nightly, rebuilding daily

the sand city.

iii

What’s concrete for me: from there I cast out further.

But need to be there. On the stone causeway. Baffled and

obstinate.

Eyes probing the dusk. Foot-slippage possible.

iv

Sleeping that time at the philosopher’s house.   Not lovers,

friends from the past.

Music the vertex of our triangle.   Bach our hypotenuse

strung between philosophy and poetry.

Sun loosening fog on the hillside, cantata spun on the

turntable:   Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.

Feeling again, in our mid-forties, the old contrapuntal ten-

sion between our natures.   The future as if still open, like

when we were classmates.

He’d met Heidegger in the Black Forest, corresponded

with Foucault.  We talked about Wittgenstein.

I was on my way to meet the one who said Philosophers have

interpreted the world:  the point is to change it.

v

On a street known for beautiful shops she buys a piece of

antique Japanese silk, a white porcelain egg.

Had abandoned her child, later went after him, found the

child had run away.

Hurt and angry, joined a group to chant through the pain.

They said, you must love yourself, give yourself gifts.

Whatever eases you someone says, lets you forgive yourself,

let go.

America, someone says.

Orphaning, orphaned here, don’t even know it.

vi

Silent limousines meet jets descending over the Rockies.

Steam rooms, pure thick towels, vases of tuberose and jas-

mine, old vintages await the après-skiers.

Rooms of mahogany and leather, conversations open in

international code.   Thighs and buttocks to open later by

arrangement.

Out of sight, out of mind, she solitary wrestles a huge

duvet, resheathes heavy tasselled bolsters.   Bed after bed.   Nights, in her room, ices strained arms.   Rests her legs.

Elsewhere, in Andhra Pradesh, another farmer swallows

pesticide.

vii

Condemned, a clinic coughs up its detritus.

Emergency exit, gurneys lined double, mercy draining

down exhausted tubes.

Drills and cranes clearing way for the new premises.

As if I already stood at their unglazed windows, eyeing the

distressed site through skeletal angles.

Tenant already of the disensoulment projects.

Had thought I deserved nothing better than these stark

towers named for conglomerates?—a line of credit, a give-

away?

viii

They asked me, is this time worse than another.

I said, for whom?

Wanted to show them something.   While I wrote on the

chalkboard they drifted out. I turned back to an empty room.

Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough.  Maybe it was too soon.

ix

The sheer mass of the thing, its thereness, stuns thought.

Since it exists, it must have existed.   Will exist.   It says so

here.

Excruciating contempt for love.   For the strained fibre of

common affections, mutual assistance

sifted up from landfill, closed tunnels, drought-sheared

riverbeds, street beds named in old census books, choked

under the expressway.

Teachers bricolating scattered schools of trust.   Rootlets

watered by fugitives.

Contraband packets, hummed messages.   Dreams of the

descendants, surfacing.

Hand reaching for its like exposes a scarred wrist.

Numerals.   A bracelet of rust.

In a desert observatory, under plaster dust, smashed lenses

left by the bombardments,

star maps crackle, unscrolling.

2006

VI

TELEPHONE RINGING IN THE LABYRINTH

i

You who can be silent in twelve languages

trying to crease again in paling light

the map you unfurled that morning   if

you in your rearview mirror sighted me

rinsing a green glass bowl

by midsummer nightsun in, say, Reykjavík

if at that moment my hand slipped

and that bowl cracked to pieces

and one piece stared at me like a gibbous moon

if its convex reflection caught you walking

the slurried highway shoulder after the car broke down

if such refractions matter

ii

Well, I’ve held on   peninsula

to continent, climber

to rockface

Sensual peninsula attached so   stroked

by the tides’ pensive and moody hands

Scaler into thin air

seen from below as weed or lichen

improvidently fastened

a mat of hair webbed in a bush

A bush ignited   then

consumed

Violent lithography

smolder’s legacy on a boulder traced

iii

Image erupts from image

atlas from vagrancy

articulation from mammal howl

strangeness from repetition

even this   default location

surveyed again   one more poem

one more Troy or Tyre or burning tire

seared eyeball genitals

charred cradle

but a different turn   working

this passage of the labyrinth

as laboratory

I’d have entered, searched before

but that ball of thread   that clew

offering an exit choice was no gift at all

iv

I found you by design or

was it your design

or: we were drawn, we drew

Midway in this delicate

negotiation   telephone rings

(Don’t stop! . . . they’ll call again . . .)

Offstage the fabulous creature scrapes and shuffles

we breathe its heavy dander

I don’t care how, if it dies   this is not the myth

No ex/interior: compressed

between my throat

and yours, hilarious oxygen

And, for the record, each did sign

our true names on the register

at the mouth of this hotel

v

I would have wanted to say it

without falling back

on words   Desired not

you so much as your life,

your prevailing   Not for me

but for furtherance   how

you would move

on the horizon   You, the person, you

the particle   fierce and furthering

2006

NOTES

ON

THE POEMS

EPIGRAPHS

From Alan Davies, review of Brenda Iijima’s Around Sea (Oakland, Calif.: O Books, 2004), in St. Mark’s in the Bowery Poetry Newsletter (April/May 2004), used by permission of Alan Davies; and from Michael S. Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

CALIBRATIONS

Landstuhl:  American military hospital in Germany.

“You go to war with the army you have”; U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, December 2004.

MELANCHOLY PIANO (extracts)

This translation was published as part of an international poetry project by the Quebec literary magazine Estuaire and the New Review of Literature (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles) with Quebecois and Anglophone-American poets translating poems by their counterparts.

Élise Turcotte’s works include Sombre Ménagerie (Montreal: Éditions du Noroît, 2002) and Diligence (Longueuil: Les Petits Villages, 2004). Her novel The Alien House (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2004) translated into English by Sheila Fischman, received the Canadian Governor General’s Prize.

IMPROVISATION ON LINES FROM EDWIN MUIR’S

“VARIATIONS ON A TIME THEME”

See Edwin Muir, Collected Poems, 1921–1951 (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), and John C. Weston, ed., Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

HUBBLE PHOTOGRAPHS: AFTER SAPPHO

For Sappho, see Greek Lyric, I: Sappho, Alcaeus, trans. David A. Campbell, Loeb Classical Library 142 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982–   ), fragment 16, pp. 66–67: “Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. . . . I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed infantry.”

THIS IS NOT THE ROOM

U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press, September 16, 2001: “we also have to work, though, sort of, the dark side . . . use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

REREADING THE DEAD LECTURER

See LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), The Dead Lecturer: Poems (New York: Grove, 1967).

LETTERS CENSORED, SHREDDED, RETURNED TO SENDER,

OR JUDGED UNFIT TO SEND

Passages in quotes are from Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, trans. Tom Nairn (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 31, 239; Antonio Gramsci, Prison Letters, ed. and trans. Hamish Henderson (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 135; and Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigeig, trans. Joseph A. Buttigeig and Antonio Callari, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), I, p. 213.

DRAFT #2006

vi: Out of sight, out of mind: See Carolyn Jones, “Battle of the Beds,”  San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 2005, p. A-1.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to the editors of journals in which these poems first appeared, some in earlier versions:

American Poetry Review: “Via Insomnia,” “Rhyme,” “Wallpaper,” “Time Exposures”

Bloom: “Hubble Photographs: After Sappho,” “Midnight, the Same Day” (as “Sign”)

Monthly Review: An Independant Socialist Magazine: “Director’s Notes”

MR webzine: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org: “Tactile Value” (as “A Debt to the World”)

The Nation: “Even Then Maybe”

The New Review of Literature: “Long after Stevens,” “Melancholy Piano”

The Progressive: “This Is Not the Room”

The Virginia Quarterly Review: “Archaic,” “Behind the Motel,” “Calibrations,” “In Plain Sight,” “Rereading The Dead Lecturer,” “Skeleton Key, “Voyage to the Dénouement,” “Unknown Quantity”

Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics: “Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender, or Judged Unfit to Send,” “Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth,” “The University Reopens as the Floods Recede”

Mandorla: Nuevas Escrituras de las Américas/New Writing from the Americas published the following in Spanish:  “Archaic,” “Rereading The Dead Lecturer,” “Skeleton Key.”

Mita’am: A Review of Literature and Radical Thought  (Israel) published “Even Then Maybe” and “This Is Not the Room” in Hebrew.

I thank my editor, Jill Bialosky, and her colleagues at W. W. Norton in New York and London; our working relationship is now a story of many years

and for their principled dedication: Frances Goldin, Steven Barclay, and their associates

and for many kinds of talk and work over the years: Svetlana Alpers; Chantal Bizzini; David, Pablo, and Jacob Conrad; Clayton Eshleman;  Suzanne Gardinier; Albert and Barbara Gelpi; Peter Gizzi; Jack Litewka; Mark Nowak; Ed Pavlic; James Scully; Hugh Seidman; Marisol Soledad Sánchez; Helen Smelser; Jean Valentine;  Maria Luisa Vezzali; Elizabeth Willis

and, once again, for her words, for a life: Michelle Cliff

Copyright © 2007 by Adrienne Rich

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

Telephone ringing in the labyrinth : poems, 2004–2006 / Adrienne Rich. — 1st ed.

p.  cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-393-06565-7

I. Title.

PS3535.I233T45  2007

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