More praise for Adrienne Rich and The School Among the Ruins

“Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right in a collection of vigorous lyric poems about the first four years of the twenty-first century, a period of terror, war, corporate imperialism, outrageous lies, and miasmal inarticulateness. A moment in history, Rich avers, in arresting imagery and flinty syntax, in which language has been processed into banality just like so much of the American landscape. Forthright, precise, witty, and keenly attuned to complacency, reluctance, and fear, Rich fights back with exhilaratingly choreographed poems about inane, high-pitched public cell-phone conversations, television’s numbing soundtrack, the crude over-simplification and commercialization of public discourse, and the ‘viral / spread of social impotence producing social silence.’”

—Booklist, starred review

“Comprising works from 2000 to 2004, the book makes acute observations about language, American identity, and the catastrophes of war. Whether lamenting the garishness of modern culture or condemning the war on terror, Rich remains a poet of impeccable principle and unwavering conscience.”

—San Francisco Weekly

“The School Among the Ruins is by turns witty, touching, engaging and a ringing call to political action.”

—Washington Blade

“This kind of writing is hard work, as George W. Bush might say,…but we are fortunate to have Rich in the trenches.”

—Time Out New York

“More than the objects we’ve taken into the new century, Rich questions how we will speak of them—with what poetry? ‘Who knows where it goes,’ she asks in ‘Apollinaire & Brassens.’ Wherever it goes, let’s hope Rich’s principled voice and vision will continue to play a part in it.”

—International Jerusalem

“Doubt—and its distant cousin, fear—are part in parcel to writing about the American experiment.…No poet has engaged her doubt so consistently and so wisely in the past half century as Adrienne Rich.…[The School Among the Ruins] reveals her at her anguished best, speaking out of compassion without ever climbing onto a soap box…. There is something relentless to Rich’s drive to open our eyes. But it is keeping with her artistic credo…it does not allow us a place to hide from injustice.”

—San Antonio Express

“Still harvesting both awards and controversy, [Rich] has become a seer for our times…. Her lyrical touch is as assured as ever…. A latter-day Cassandra, prepared, on occasion, to jettison her beloved lyricism on the hope of shocking us into self-knowledge.”

—Jewish Quarterly

BY ADRIENNE RICH

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 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

Leaflets

Necessities of Life

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

The Diamond Cutters

A Change of World

ADRIENNE RICH

THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS

POEMS

2000–2004

W • W • NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK • LONDON

Copyright © 2004 by Adrienne Rich

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Production manager: Amanda Morrison

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

The school among the ruins: poems, 2000–2004 / Adrienne Rich.—1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-393-07077-4

I. Title.

PS3535.I233S36 2004

811’.54—dc22

2004008370

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

FOR JEAN VALENTINE

CONTENTS

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 laughter in 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

Notes on the Poems

Acknowledgments

I

CENTAUR’S REQUIEM

Your hooves drawn together underbelly

shoulders in mud your mane

of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you

your longhaired neck

eyes jaw yes and ears

unforgivably human on such a creature

unforgivably what you are

deposited in the grit-kicked field of a champion

tender neck and nostrils teacher water-lily suction-spot

what you were marvelous we could not stand

Night drops an awaited storm

driving in to wreck your path

Foam on your hide like flowers

where you fell or fall desire

2001

EQUINOX

Time split like a fruit between dark and light

and a usual fog drags

over this landfall

I’ve walked September end to end

barefoot room to room

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

or wick eyes open

to abalone shells memorial candle flames

split lemons roses laid

along charring logs Gorgeous things:

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

wetland burnt garbage looming at its heart

gunmetal thicket midnightblue blood and

tricking masks I thought I knew

history was not a novel

So can I say it was not I listed as Innocence

betrayed you serving (and protesting always)

the motives of my government

thinking we’d scratch out a place

where poetry old subversive shape

grew out of Nowhere here?

where skin could lie on skin

a place “outside the limits”

Can say I was mistaken?

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

Over and over have let it be

damage to others crushing of the animate core

that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world

so bruised: heart spleen long inflamed ribbons of the guts

the spine’s vertical necklace swaying

Have let it swarm

through us let it happen

as it must, inmost

but before this: long before this those other eyes

frontally exposed themselves and spoke

2001

TELL ME

1

Tell me, why way toward dawn the body

close to a body familiar as itself

chills—tell me, is this the hour

remembered if outlived

as freezing—no, don’t tell me

Dreams spiral birdwinged overhead

a peculiar hour the silver mirror-frame’s

quick laugh the caught light-lattice on the wall

as a truck drives off before dawn

headlights on

Not wanting to

write this up for the public not wanting

to write it down in secret

just to lie here in this cold story

feeling it trying to feel it through

2

Blink and smoke, flicking with absent nail

at the mica bar

where she refills without asking

Crouch into your raingarb this will be a night

unauthorized shock troops are abroad

this will be a night

the face-ghosts lean

over the banister

declaring the old stories all

froze like beards or frozen margaritas

all the new stories taste of lukewarm

margaritas, lukewarm kisses

3

From whence I draw this: harrowed in defeats of language

in history to my barest marrow

This: one syllable then another

gropes upward

one stroke laid on another

sound from one throat then another

never in the making

making beauty or sense

always mis-taken, draft, roughed-in

only to be struck out

is blurt is roughed-up

hot keeps body

in leaden hour

simmering

2001

FOR JUNE, IN THE YEAR 2001

The world’s quiver and shine

I’d clasp for you forever

jetty vanishing into pearlwhite mist

western sunstruck water-light

Touch food to the lips

let taste never betray you

cinnamon vanilla melting

on apple tart

but what you really craved:

a potency of words

Driving back from Berkeley

880’s brute dystopia

I was at war with words

Later on C-Span: Tallahassee:

words straight to the point:

One person, one vote

No justice, no peace

it could lift you by the hair

it could move you like a wind

it could take you by surprise

as sudden Canada geese

took us by the marina

poised necks and alert

attitudes of pause

Almost home I wanted

you to smell the budding acacias

tangled with eucalyptus

on the road to Santa Cruz

2002

THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS

Beirut. Baghdad. Sarajevo. Bethlehem. Kabul. Not of course here.

1

Teaching the first lesson and the last

—great falling light of summer will you last

longer than schooltime?

When children flow

in columns at the doors

BOYS GIRLS and the busy teachers

open or close high windows

with hooked poles drawing darkgreen shades

closets unlocked, locked

questions unasked, asked, when

love of the fresh impeccable

sharp-pencilled yes

order without cruelty

a street on earth neither heaven nor hell

busy with commerce and worship

young teachers walking to school

fresh bread and early-open foodstalls

2

When the offensive rocks the sky when nightglare

misconstrues day and night when lived-in

rooms from the upper city

tumble cratering lower streets

cornices of olden ornament human debris

when fear vacuums out the streets

When the whole town flinches

blood on the undersole thickening to glass

Whoever crosses hunched knees bent a contested zone

knows why she does this suicidal thing

School’s now in session day and night

children sleep

in the classrooms teachers rolled close

3

How the good teacher loved

his school the students

the lunchroom with fresh sandwiches

lemonade and milk

the classroom glass cages

of moss and turtles

teaching responsibility

A morning breaks without bread or fresh-poured milk

parents or lesson plans

diarrhea first question of the day

children shivering it’s September

Second question: where is my mother?

4

One: I don’t know where your mother

is Two: I don’t know

why they are trying to hurt us

Three: or the latitude and longitude

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

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

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

Today this is your lesson:

write as clearly as you can

your name home street and number

down on this page

No you can’t go home yet

but you aren’t lost

this is our school

I’m not sure what we’ll eat

we’ll look for healthy roots and greens

searching for water though the pipes are broken

5

There’s a young cat sticking

her head through window bars

she’s hungry like us

but can feed on mice

her bronze erupting fur

speaks of a life already wild

her golden eyes

don’t give quarter She’ll teach us Let’s call her

Sister

when we get milk we’ll give her some

6

I’ve told you, let’s try to sleep in this funny camp

All night pitiless pilotless things go shrieking

above us to somewhere

Don’t let your faces turn to stone

Don’t stop asking me why

Let’s pay attention to our cat she needs us

Maybe tomorrow the bakers can fix their ovens

7

“We sang them to naps told stories made

shadow-animals with our hands

wiped human debris off boots and coats

sat learning by heart the names

some were too young to write

some had forgotten how”

2001

THIS EVENING LET’S

not talk

about my country How

I’m from an optimistic culture

that speaks louder than my passport

Don’t double-agent-contra my

invincible innocence I’ve

got my own

suspicions Let’s

order retsina

cracked olives and bread

I’ve got questions of my own but

let’s give a little

let’s let a little be

If friendship is not a tragedy

if it’s a mercy

we can be merciful

if it’s just escape

we’re neither of us running

why otherwise be here

Too many reasons not

to waste a rainy evening

in a backroom of bouzouki

and kitchen Greek

I’ve got questions of my own but

let’s let it be a little

There’s a beat in my head

song of my country

called Happiness, U.S.A.

Drowns out bouzouki

drowns out world and fusion

with its Get—get—get

into your happiness before

happiness pulls away

hangs a left along the piney shore

weaves a hand at you—“one I adore”—

Don’t be proud, run hard for that

enchantment boat

tear up the shore if you must but

get into your happiness because

before

and otherwise

it’s going to pull away

So tell me later

what I know already

and what I don’t get

yet save for another day

Tell me this time

what you are going through

travelling the Metropolitan

Express

break out of that style

give me your smile

awhile

2001

VARIATIONS ON LINES FROM A CANADIAN POET

I needed a genre for the times I go phantom. I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence. I needed a genre to pry loose Liberty from an impacted marriage with the soil. I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress’ complicity….

—Lisa Robertson, XEclogue (1993)

I need a gloss for the silence implicit in my legacy

for phantom Liberty standing bridal at my harbor

I need a gauze to slow the hemorrhaging of my history

I need an ancestor complicit in my undercover prying

I need soil that whirls and spirals upward somewhere else

I need dustbowl, sand dune, dustdevils for roots

I need the border-crossing eye of a tornado

I need an ancestor fleeing into Canada

to rampage freedom there or keep on fleeing

to keep on fleeing or invent a genre

to distemper ideology

2002

DELIVERED CLEAN

You’ve got to separate what they signify from what

they are distinguish

their claimed intentions from the stuff coming

out from their hands and heads The professor of cultural dynamics

taught us this They’re disasters in absentia

really when supposedly working

Look at the record:

lost their minds wrote bad checks and smoked in bed

and if they were men were bad with women and if they were women

picked men like that or would go with women

and talked too much and burnt the toast and abused all

known substances Anyone who says

they were generous to a fault putting change

in whoever’s cup if they had it on them always room for the friend

with no place to sleep refused to make what they made

in the image of the going thing

cooked up stews that could keep you alive with

gizzards and onions and splashes of raw

red wine were

loyal where they loved and wouldn’t name names

should remember said the professor of cultural

dynamics what

messes they made

The building will be delivered vacant

of street actors so-called artists in residence

fast-order cooks on minimum wage

who dreamed up a life where space was cheap

muralists doubling as rabble-rousers

cross-dressing pavement poets

delivered clean

of those who harbor feral cats illegals illicit ideas

selling their blood to buy old vinyls

living at night and sleeping by day

with huge green plants in their windows

and huge eyes painted on their doors.

[for Jack Foley]

2002

THE EYE

A balcony, violet shade on stucco fruit in a plastic bowl on the iron

raggedy legged table, grapes and sliced melon, saucers, a knife, wine

in a couple of thick short tumblers cream cheese once came in: our snack

in the eye of the war There are places where fruit is implausible, even

rest is implausible, places where wine if any should be poured into wounds

but we’re not yet there or it’s not here yet it’s the war

not us, that moves, pauses and hurtles forward into the neck

and groin of the city, the soft indefensible places but not here yet

Behind the balcony an apartment, papers, pillows, green vines still watered

there are waterless places but not here yet, there’s a bureau topped

with marble

and combs and brushes on it, little tubes for lips and eyebrows, a dish

of coins and keys

there’s a bed a desk a stove a cane rocker a bookcase civilization

cage with a skittery bird, there are birdless places but not

here yet, this bird must creak and flutter in the name of all

uprooted orchards, limbless groves

this bird standing for wings and song that here can’t fly

Our bed quilted wine poured future uncertain you’d think

people like us would have it scanned and planned tickets to somewhere

would be in the drawer with all our education you’d think we’d

have taken measures

soon as ash started turning up on the edges of everything ash

in the leaves of books ash on the leaves of trees and in the veins of

the passive

innocent life we were leading calling it hope

you’d think that and we thought this it’s the war not us that’s moving

like shade on a balcony

2002

THERE IS NO ONE STORY AND ONE STORY ONLY

The engineer’s story of hauling coal

to Davenport for the cement factory, sitting on the bluffs

between runs looking for whales, hauling concrete

back to Gilroy, he and his wife renewing vows

in the glass chapel in Arkansas after 25 years

The flight attendant’s story murmured

to the flight steward in the dark galley

of her fifth-month loss of nerve

about carrying the baby she’d seen on the screen

The story of the forensic medical team’s

small plane landing on an Alaska icefield

of the body in the bag they had to drag

over the ice like the whole life of that body

The story of the man driving

600 miles to be with a friend in another country seeming

easy when leaving but afterward

writing in a letter difficult truths

Of the friend watching him leave remembering

the story of her body

with his once and the stories of their children

made with other people and how his mind went on

pressing hers like a body

There is the story of the mind’s

temperature neither cold nor celibate

Ardent The story of

not one thing only.

2002

II

USONIAN JOURNALS 2000

USONIAN JOURNALS 2000

[Usonian: the term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired architecture. Here, of the United States of North America.]

Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare

A country I was born and lived in undergoes rapid and flagrant change. I return here as a stranger. In fact I’ve lived here all along. At a certain point I realized I was no longer connected along any continuous strand to the nature of the change. I can’t find my passport. Nobody asks me to show it.

Day/Job/Mare

…to lunch with K., USonian but recently from a British university. Described as “our Marxist.” Dark and pretty, already she’s got half the department classified: She’s crazy…He’s carrying the chip of race on his shoulder…she’s here because he is, isn’t she?…He’s not likely to make it through… Ask her about current Brit. labor scene; she talks about the influence of the industrial revolution on Victorian prose. My aim: get clear of this, find another day job.

As we left the dark publike restaurant the street—ordinary enough couple of blocks between a parking lot and an office complex—broke into spitting, popping sounds and sudden running. I held back against the wall, she beside me. Something happened then everything. A man’s voice screamed, then whined: a police siren starting up seemed miles away but then right there. I didn’t see any blood. We ran in different directions, she toward, I away from, the police.

Document Window

Could I just show what’s happening. Not that shooting, civil disturbance, whatever it was. I’d like you to see how differently we’re all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter, how quickly things and people get replaced. How interchangeable it all could get to seem. Could get to seem… the kind of phrase we use now, avoiding the verb to be. There’s a sense in which, we say, dismissing other senses.

Rimbaud called for the rational derangement of all the senses in the name of poetry. Marx: capitalism deranges all the senses save the sense of property.

Keeping my back against unimportant walls I moved out of range of the confusion, away from the protection of the police. Having seen nothing I could swear to I felt at peace with my default. I would, at least, not be engaged in some mess not my own.

This is what I mean though: how differently we move now, rapidly deciding what is and isn’t ours. Indifferently.

Voices

Wreathed around the entrance to a shopping mall, a student dining hall, don’t pause for a word, or to articulate an idea. What hangs a moment in the air is already dead: That’s history.

The moment—Edwin Denby describes it—when a dancer, leaping, stands still in the air. Pause in conversation when time would stop, an idea hang suspended, then get taken up and carried on. (Then that other great style of conversation: everyone at once, each possessed with an idea.) This newer conversation: I am here and talking, talking, here and talking…Television the first great lesson: against silence. “I thought she’d never call and I went aaah! to my friend and she went give it a week, she’ll call you all right and you did”—“And you went waowh! and I went, right, I went O.K., it’s only I was clueless? so now can we grab something nearby, cause I’m due on in forty-five?”

A neighbor painting his garage yelling in cell phone from the driveway: voice that penetrates kitchen-window glass. “Fucking worst day of my fucking life, fucking wife left me for another man, both on coke and, you know? I don’t CARE! thought it was only maryjane she was, do you KNOW the prison term for coke? Fucking dealer, leaves me for him because she’s HOOKED and I’m supposed to CARE? Do they know what they’ll GET?”

Private urgencies made public, not collective, speaker within a bubble. In the new restaurant: “Marty? Thought I’d never get through to you. We need to move quickly with SZ-02, there are hounds on the trail. Barney won’t block you at all. Just give him what we talked about.”

USonian speech. Men of the upwardly mobilizing class needing to sound boyish, an asset in all the newness of the new: upstart, startup, adventurist, pirate lad’s nasal bravado in the male vocal cords. Voices of girls and women screeking to an excitable edge of brightness. In an excessively powerful country, grown women sound like girls without authority or experience. Male, female voices alike pitched fastforward commercial, one timbre, tempo, intonation.

Mirrors

Possible tones of the human voice, their own possible physical beauty—no recognition. The fish-eye lens bobbles faces back. Bodies heavy with sad or enraged feminine or macho brooding mimic stand-up comics, celebrities; grimace, gesticulate. The nakedest generation of young USonians with little intuition of the human history of nakedness, luminous inventions of skin and musculature. Their surfaces needlepointed with conventionally outrageous emblems, what mirror to render justly their original beauty back to them?

You touched me in places so deep I wanted to ignore you.

Artworks (I)

Painting on a gallery wall: people dwelling on opposite sides of a pane of glass. None of their eyes exchanging looks. Yellow flashes off the rug in the room and from the orchard beyond. House of people whose eyes do not meet.

White people doing and seeing no evil.

(Photograph of family reunion, eyes on the wide-lens camera, unmeeting.) “In fact I’ve lived here all along.”

That was them not us. We were at the time in the time of our displacement, being torn from a false integrity. We stared at the pictures in the gallery knowing they were not us, we were being driven further for something else and who knew how far and for how long and what we were to do.

Stranger

Isolation begins to form, moves in like fog on a clear afternoon. Arrives with the mail, leaves its messages on the phone machine. If you hadn’t undergone this so often it could take you by surprise, but its rime-white structure is the simple blueprint of your displacement. You: who pride yourself on not giving in, keep discovering in dreams new rooms in an old house, drawing new plans: living with strangers, enough for all, wild tomato plants along the road, redness for hunger and thirst. (Unrest, too, in the house of dreams: the underworld lashing back.)

But this fog blanks echoes, blots reciprocal sounds. The padded cell of a moribund democracy, or just your individual case?

Artworks (II)

Early summer lunch with friends, talk rises: poetry, urban design and planning, film. Strands of interest and affection binding us differently around the table. If an uneasy political theme rears up—the meaning of a show of lynching photographs in New York, after Mapplethorpe’s photos, of sociopathic evil inside the California prison industry—talk fades. Not a pause but: a suppression. No one is monitoring this conversation but us. We know the air is bad in here, maybe want not to push that knowledge, ask what is to be done? How to breathe? What will suffice? Draft new structures or simply be aware? If art is our only resistance, what does that make us? If we’re collaborators, what’s our offering to corruption—an aesthetic, anaesthetic, dye of silence, withdrawal, intellectual disgust?

This fade-out/suspension of conversation: a syndrome of the past decades? our companionate immune systems under siege, viral spread of social impotence producing social silence?

Imagine written language that walks away from human conversation. A written literature, back turned to oral traditions, estranged from music and body. So what might reanimate, rearticulate, becomes less and less available.

Incline

Dreamroad rising steeply uphill; David is driving. I see it turning into a perpendicular structure salvaged from a long metal billboard: we will have to traverse this at a ninety-degree angle, then at the top go over and down the other side. There are no exits. Around is the Mojave Desert: open space. D.’s car begins to lose momentum as the incline increases; he tries shifting into a lower gear and gunning the engine. There is no way off this incline now, we’re forced into a situation we hadn’t reckoned on—a road now become something that is no road, something designated as “commercial space.” I suggest rolling (ourselves in) the car down the steep dusty shoulder into the desert below, and out. For both of us, the desert isn’t vacancy or fear, it’s life, a million forms of witness. The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon.

Mission Statement

The Organization for the Abolition of Cruelty has an air deployment with bases on every continent and on obscurer tracts of land. Airstrips and hangars have been constructed to accommodate large and small aircraft for reconnoiter and rescue missions whether on polar ice or in desert or rainforest conditions. Many types of craft are of course deployed to urban clusters. The mission of the Organization is not to the First, Third, or any other World. It is directed toward the investigation and abrogation of cruelty in every direction, including present and future extraterrestrial locations.

It is obvious that the destruction of despair is still our most urgent task. In this regard, we employ paramilitary methods with great care and watchfulness.

The personnel dedicated to this new program are responsible to the mission, not to any national body. We are apprised of all new technologies as soon as available. Hence we have a unique fusion of policy and technology, unique in that its purpose is the abolition of cruelty.

Ours is the first project of its kind to be fully empowered through the new paranational charters. In principle, it is now recognized that both agents and objects of cruelty must be rescued and transformed, and that they sometimes merge into each other.

In response to your inquiry: this is a complex operation. We have a wide range of specializations and concerns. Some are especially calibrated toward language

because of its known and unknown powers

to bind and to dissociate

because of its capacity

to ostracize the speechless

because of its capacity

to nourish self-deception

because of its capacity

for rebirth and subversion

because of the history

of torture

against human speech

2000–2002

III

TERRITORY SHARED

ADDRESS

Orientation of the word toward its addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant…. Each and every word expresses the “one” in relation to the “other.”…A word is territory shared by both addressor and addressee, by the speaker and his interlocutor.

—V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

If all we would speak is ideology

believable walking past pent-up Christmas trees

in a California parking lot day before Thanksgiving hot sun

on faint

scent of spruce in the supermarket

mixed metaphors of food

faces expectant, baffled, bitter, distracted

wandering aisles or like me and the man ahead of me buying

only milk

my car door grabbed open by a woman

thinking it her husband’s car honking for her somewhere else

—and I think it true indeed I know

I who came only for milk am speaking it: though

would stand somewhere beyond

this civic nausea

: desiring not to stand apart

like Jeffers giving up on his kind loving only unhuman creatures

because they transcend ideology in eternity as he thought

but he wasn’t writing to them

nor today’s gull perched on the traffic light

Nor can this be about remorse

staring over its shopping cart

feeling its vague ideological thoughts

nor about lines of credit

blanketing shame and fear

nor being conscripted for violence

from without beckoning at rage within

I know what it cannot be

But who at the checkout this one day

do I address who is addressing me

what’s the approach whose the manners

whose dignity whose truth

when the change purse is tipped into the palm

for an exact amount without which

2002

TRANSPARENCIES

That the meek word like the righteous word can bully

that an Israeli soldier interviewed years

after the first Intifada could mourn on camera

what under orders he did, saw done, did not refuse

that another leaving Beit Jala could scrawl

on a wall: We are truely sorry for the mess we made

is merely routine word that would cancel deed

That human equals innocent and guilty

That we grasp for innocence whether or no

is elementary That words can translate into broken bones

That the power to hurl words is a weapon

That the body can be a weapon

any child on playground knows That asked your favorite word

in a game

you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river

(never a pronoun never God or War)

is taken for granted That word and body

are all we have to lay on the line

That words are windowpanes in a ransacked hut, smeared

by time’s dirty rains, we might argue

likewise that words are clear as glass till the sun strikes it blinding

But that in a dark windowpane you have seen your face

That when you wipe your glasses the text grows clearer

That the sound of crunching glass comes at the height of the

wedding

That I can look through glass

into my neighbor’s house

but not my neighbor’s life

That glass is sometimes broken to save lives

That a word can be crushed like a goblet underfoot

is only what it seems, part question, part answer: how

you live it

2002

LIVRESQUE

There hangs a space between the man

and his words

like the space around a few snowflakes

just languidly beginning

space

where an oil rig has dissolved in fog

man in self-arrest

between word and act

writing agape, agape

with a silver fountain pen

2002

COLLABORATIONS

I

Thought of this “our” nation:: thought of war

ghosts of war fugitive

in labyrinths of amnesia

veterans out-of-date textbooks in a library basement

evidence trundled off plutonium under tarps after dark

didn’t realize it until I wrote it

August now apples have started

severing from the tree

over the deck by night their dim impact

thuds into dreams

by daylight bruised starting to stew in sun

saying “apple” to nose and tongue

to memory

Word following sense, the way it should be

and if you don’t speak the word

do you lose your senses

And isn’t this just one speck, one atom

on the glazed surface we call

America

from which I write

the war ghosts treading in their shredded

disguises above the clouds

and the price we pay here still opaque as the fog

these mornings

we always say will break open?

II

Try this on your tongue: “the poetry of the enemy”

If you read it will you succumb

Will the enemy’s wren fly through your window

and circle your room

Will you smell the herbs hung to dry in the house

he has had to rebuild in words

Would it weaken your will to hear

riffs of the instruments he loves

rustling of rivers remembered

where faucets are dry

“The enemy’s water” is there a phrase

for that in your language?

And you what do you write

now in your borrowed house tuned in

to the broadcasts of horror

under a sagging arbor, dimdumim

do you grope for poetry

to embrace all this

—not describe, embrace staggering

in its arms, Jacob-and-angel-wise?

III

Do you understand why I want your voice?

At the seder table it’s said

you reclined and said nothing

now in the month of Elul is your throat so dry

your dreams so stony

you wake with their grit in your mouth?

There was a beautiful life here once

Our enemies poisoned it?

Make a list of what’s lost but don’t

call it a poem

that’s for the scriptors of nostalgia

bent to their copying-desks

Make a list of what you love well

twist it insert it

into a bottle of old Roman glass

go to the edge of the sea

at Haifa where the refugee ships lurched in

and the ships of deportation wrenched away

IV

for Giora Leshem

Drove upcoast first day of another year no rain

oxalis gold lakes floating

on January green

Can winter tides off the Levant

churn up wilder spume?

Think Crusades, remember Acre

wind driving at fortress walls

everything returns in time except the

utterly disappeared

What thou lovest well can well be reft from thee

What does not change / is the will

to vanquish

the fascination with what’s easiest

see it in any video arcade

is this what the wind is driving at?

Where are you Giora? whose hands

lay across mine a moment

Can you still believe that afternoon

talking you smoking light and shade

on the deck, here in California

our laughter, your questions of translation

your daughter’s flute?

2002–2003

RITUAL ACTS

i

We are asking for books

No, not—but a list of books

to be given to young people

Well, to young poets

to guide them in their work

He gestures impatiently

They won’t read he says

My time is precious

If they want to they’ll find

whatever they need

I’m going for a walk after lunch

After that I lie down

Then and only then do I read the papers

Mornings are for work

the proofs of the second volume

—my trilogy, and he nods

And we too nod recognition

ii

The buses—packed

since the subways are forbidden

and the highways forsaken

so people bring everything on—

what they can’t do without—

Air conditioners, sculpture

Double baskets of babies

Fruit platters, crematory urns

Sacks of laundry, of books

Inflated hearts, bass fiddles

Bridal gowns in plastic bags

Pet iguanas, oxygen tanks

The tablets of Moses

iii

After all—to have loved, wasn’t that the object?

Love is the only thing in life

but then you can love too much

or the wrong way, you lose

yourself or you lose

the person

or you strangle each other

Maybe the object of love is

to have loved

greatly

at one time or another

Like a cinema trailer

watched long ago

iv

You need to turn yourself around

face in another direction

She wrapped herself in a flag

soaked it in gasoline and lit a match

This is for the murdered babies

they say she said

Others heard

for the honor of my country

Others remember

the smell and how she screamed

Others say, This was just theater

v

This will not be a love scene

but an act between two humans

Now please let us see you

tenderly scoop his balls

into your hand

You will hold them

under your face

There will be tears on your face

That will be all

the director said

We will not see his face

He wants to do the scene

but not to show

his face

vi

A goat devouring a flowering plant

A child squeezing through a fence to school

A woman slicing an onion

A bare foot sticking out

A wash line tied to a torn-up tree

A dog’s leg lifted at a standpipe

An old man kneeling to drink there

A hand on the remote

We would like to show but to not be obvious

except to the oblivious

We want to show ordinary life

We are dying to show it

2003

POINT IN TIME

If she’s writing a letter on a sheet of mica

to be left on the shelf of the cave

with the century’s other letters each

stained with its own DNA expressed

in love’s naked dark or the dawn

of a day of stone:

it’s a fact like a town crosshaired on a map

But we are not keeping archives here

where all can be blown away

nor raking the graves in Père-Lachaise

nor is she beholden or dutiful

as her pen pushes its final stroke

into the mineral page

molecule speaking to molecule

for just this moment

This is the point in time when

she must re-condense her purpose

like ink, like rain, like winter light

like foolishness and hatred

like the blood her hand first knew

as a wet patch on the staircase wall

she was feeling her way down in the dark.

2003

IV

ALTERNATING CURRENT

ALTERNATING CURRENT

Sometimes I’m back in that city

in its/ not my/ autumn

crossing a white bridge

over a dun-green river

eating shellfish with young poets

under the wrought-iron roof of the great market

drinking with the dead poet’s friend

to music struck

from odd small instruments

walking arm in arm with the cinematographer

through the whitelight gardens of Villa Grimaldi

earth and air stretched

to splitting still

his question:

have you ever been in a place like this?

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

No bad dreams. Her arm or leg or hair.

No bad dreams. A wheelchair unit screaming

off the block. No bad dreams. Pouches of blood: red cells,

plasma. Not here. No, none. Not yet.

Take one, take two

—camera out of focus delirium swims

across the lens Don’t get me wrong I’m not

critiquing your direction

but I was there saw what you didn’t

take the care

you didn’t first of yourself then

of the child Don’t get me wrong I’m on

your side but standing off

where it rains not on the set where it’s

not raining yet

take three

What’s suffered in laughter in aroused afternoons

in nightly yearlong back-to-back

wandering each others’ nerves and pulses

O changing love that doesn’t change

A deluxe blending machine

A chair with truth’s coat of arms

A murderous code of manners

A silver cocktail reflecting a tiny severed hand

A small bird stuffed with print and roasted

A row of Lucite chessmen filled with shaving lotion

A bloodred valentine to power

A watered-silk innocence

A microwaved foie gras

A dry-ice carrier for conscience donations

A used set of satin sheets folded to go

A box at the opera of suffering

A fellowship at the villa, all expenses

A Caterpillar’s tracks gashing the environment

A bad day for students of the environment

A breakdown of the blending machine

A rush to put it in order

A song in the chapel a speech a press release

As finally by wind or grass

drive-ins

where romance always was

an after-dark phenomenon

lie crazed and still

great panoramas lost to air

this time this site of power shall pass

and we remain or not but not remain

as now we think we are

for J.J.

When we are shaken out

when we are shaken out to the last vestige

when history is done with us

when our late grains glitter

salt swept into shadow

indignant and importunate strife-fractured crystals

will it matter if our tenderness (our solidarity)

abides in residue

long as there’s tenderness and solidarity

Could the tempos and attunements of my voice

in a poem or yours or yours and mine

in telephonic high hilarity

cresting above some stupefied inanity

be more than personal

(and—as you once said—what’s wrong with that?)

2002–2003

V

If some long unborn friend

looks at photos in pity,

we say, sure we were happy,

but it was not in the wind.

MEMORIZE THIS

i

Love for twenty-six years, you can’t stop

A withered petunia’s crisp the bud sticky both are dark

The flower engulfed in its own purple So common, nothing

like it

The old woodstove gone to the dump

Sun plunges through the new skylight

This morning’s clouds piled like autumn in Massachusetts

This afternoon’s far-flung like the Mojave

Night melts one body into another

One drives fast the other maps a route

Thought new it becomes familiar

From thirteen years back maybe

One oils the hinges one edges the knives

One loses an earring the other finds it

One says I’d rather make love

Than go to the Greek Festival

The other, I agree.

ii

Take a strand of your hair

on my fingers let it fall

across the pillow lift to my nostrils

inhale your body entire

Sleeping with you after

weeks apart how normal

yet after midnight

to turn and slide my arm

along your thigh

drawn up in sleep

what delicate amaze

2002–2003

THE PAINTER’S HOUSE

Nineteen-thirties midwestern

—the painter long gone to the sea—

plutonic sycamore by the shed

a mailbox open mouthed

in garden loam a chip

of veiny china turned

up there where he might have stood

eyeing the dim lip of grass

beyond, the spring stars sharpening

above

Well since there’s still light walk around

stand on the porch

cup hands around eyes peering in

Is this the kitchen where she worked and thought

Is that the loft where their bodies fell

into each other The nail where the mirror

hung the shelf where her college books

eyed her aslant

Those stairs would her bare feet have felt?

In the mute shed no trace

of masterworks occult

fury of pigment no

downslash of provocation

no whirled hands at the doorjamb

no lightning streak no stab in the dark

no sex no face

2003

AFTER APOLLINAIRE & BRASSENS

When the bridge of lovers bends

over the oilblack river

and we see our own endings

through eyes aching and blearing

when the assault begins

and we’re thrown apart still longing

when the Bridge of Arts trembles

under the streaked sky

when words of the poets tumble

into the shuddering stream

where who knew what joy

would leap after what pain

what flows under the Seine

Mississippi Jordan Tigris

Elbe Amazon Indus Nile

and all the tributaries

who knows where song goes

now and from whom

toward what longings

2003

SLASHES

Years pass and two who once

don’t know each other at all

dark strokes gouge a white wall as lives

and customs slashed by dates:

October ’17 / May ’68

/ September ’73

Slash across lives memory pursues its errands

a lent linen shirt pulled unabashedly over her naked shoulders

cardamom seed bitten in her teeth

watching him chop onions

words in the air segregation/partition/apartheid

vodka/cigarette smoke a time

vertigo on subway stairs

Years pass she pressing the time into a box

not to be opened a box

quelling pleasure and pain

You could describe something like this

in gossip write a novel get it wrong

In wolf-tree, see the former field

The river’s muscle: greater than its length

the lake’s light-blistered blue: scorning

circumference

A map inscribes relation

only when

underground aquifers are fathomed in

water table rising or falling

beneath apparently

imperturbable earth

music from a basement session overheard

2002

TRACE ELEMENTS

Back to the shallow pond sharp rotting scatter

leaf-skinned edge there where the ring

couldn’t be sunk far out enough

(far enough from shore)

back out the rock-toothed logging road

to the dark brook where it’s dropped mudsucked gold

(sucked under stones)

that’s another marriage lucid and decisive

to say at last: I did, I do, I will

(I did not, I will not)

Snow-whirled streetlamps under a window

(a bedroom and a window)

icy inch of the raised sash blizzard clearing to calm

outlined furniture: figured mirror: bedded bodies:

warm blood: eyes in the dark:

no contradiction:

She was there

and they were there: her only now seeing it (only now)

Bow season: then gun season

Apricot leaves bloodsprinkled: soaked: case closed

Memory: echo in time

All’s widescreen now lurid inchoate century

Vast disappearing acts the greatest show on earth

but here are small clear refractions

from an unclear season

blood on a leaf

gold trace element in water

light from the eye behind the eye

2003

BRACT

Stories of three islands

you’ve told me, over years

over meals, after quarrels,

light changing the spectrum of your hair

your green eyes, lying on our backs

naked or clothed, driving

through wind, eighteen-wheeler trucks

of produce crates ahead and behind

you saying, I couldn’t live long

far from the ocean

Spring of new and continuing

war, harpsichord crashing

under Verlet’s fingers

I tell you I could not live long

far from your anger

lunar reefed and tidal

bloodred bract from spiked stem

tossing on the ocean

2003

VI

DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS

DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS

1

Still learning the word

“home” or what it could mean

say, to relinquish

a backdrop of Japanese maples turning

color of rusted wheelbarrow bottom

where the dahlia tubers were thrown

You must go live in the city now

over the subway though not on

its grating

must endure the foreign music

of the block party

finger in useless anger

the dangling cords of the window blind

2

In a vast dystopic space the small things

multiply

when all the pills run out the pain

grows more general

flies find the many eyes

quarrels thicken then

weaken

tiny mandibles of rumor open and close

blame has a name that will not be spoken

you grasp or share a clot of food

according to your nature

or your strength

love’s ferocity snarls

from under the drenched blanket’s hood

3

City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker

whatever it can

casual salutations first

little rivulets of thought

then wanting stronger stuff

sucks at the marrow of selves

the nurse’s long knowledge of wounds

the rabbi’s scroll of ethics

the young worker’s defiance

only the solipsist seems intact

in her prewar building

4

For recalcitrancy of attitude

the surgeon is transferred

to the V.A. hospital where poverty

is the administrator

of necessity and her

orders don’t necessarily

get obeyed

because

the government

is paying

and the

used-to-be

warriors

are patients

5

Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain

remember Paul Nizan?

You thought you were innocent if you said

“I love this woman and I want to live

in accordance with my love”

but you were beginning the revolution

maybe so, maybe not

look at her now

pale lips papery flesh

at your creased belly wrinkled sac

look at the scars

reality’s autographs

along your ribs across her haunches

look at the collarbone’s reverberant line

how in a body can defiance

still embrace its likeness

6

Not to get up and go back to the drafting table

where failure crouches accusing

like the math test you bluffed and flunked

so early on

not to drag into the window’s

cruel and truthful light your blunder

not to start over

but to turn your back, saying

all anyway is compromise

impotence and collusion

from here on I will be no part of it

is one way could you afford it

7

Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment

the last domestic traces, cup and towel

awaiting final disposal

—has ironed his shirt for travel

left an envelope for the cleaning woman

on the counter under the iron

internationalist turning toward home

three continents to cross documents declarations

searches queues

and home no simple matter

of hearth or harbor

bleeding from internal wounds

he diagnosed physician

without frontiers

2002

VII

FIVE O’CLOCK, JANUARY 2003

Tonight as cargoes of my young

fellow countrymen and women are being hauled

into positions aimed at death, positions

they who did not will it suddenly

have to assume

I am thinking of Ed Azevedo

half-awake in recovery

if he has his arm whole

and how much pain he must bear

under the drugs

On cliffs above a beach

luxuriant in low tide after storms

littered with driftwood hurled and piled and

humanly arranged in fantastic

installations and beyond

silk-blue and onion-silver-skinned

Jeffers’ “most glorious creature on earth”

we passed, greeting, I saw his arm

bandaged to the elbow

asked and he told me: It was just

a small cut, nothing, on the hand he’d

washed in peroxide thinking

that was it until the pain began

traveling up his arm

and then the antibiotics the splint the

numbing drugs the sick sensation

and this evening at five o’clock the emergency

surgery and last summer

the train from Czechoslovakia to Spain

with his girl, cheap wine, bread and cheese

room with a balcony, ocean like this

nobody asking for pay in advance

kindness of foreigners

in that country, sick sensation now

needing to sit in his brother’s truck again

even the accident on the motorcycle

was nothing like this

I’ll be thinking of you at five

this evening I said

afterward you’ll feel better, your body

will be clean of this poison

I didn’t say Your war is here

but could you have believed

that from a small thing infection

would crawl through the blood

and the enormous ruffled shine

of an ocean wouldn’t tell you.

2003

WAIT

In paradise every

the desert wind is rising

third thought

in hell there are no thoughts

is of earth

sand screams against your government

issued tent hell’s noise

in your nostrils crawl

into your ear-shell

wrap yourself in no-thought

wait no place for the little lyric

wedding-ring glint the reason why

on earth

they never told you

2003

DON’T TAKE ME

too seriously please

take the December goodness

of my neighbors’ light-strung eaves

take the struggle helping with the tree

for the children’s sake

don’t take me seriously

on questionnaires about faith and fault

and country Don’t

take me for a loner don’t take me for a foreigner don’t

take me in the public

library checking definitions

of freedom in the dictionary or

tracing satellites after curfew

or in my Goodwill truck delivering a repaired TV

to the house of the foil’d revolutionary

2002

TO HAVE WRITTEN THE TRUTH

To have spent hours stalking the whine of an insect

have smashed its body in blood on a door

then lain sleepless with rage

to have played in the ship’s orchestra crossing

the triangle route

dissonant arpeggios under cocktail clatter

to have written the truth in a lightning flash

then crushed those words in your hand

balled-up and smoking

when self-absolution

easygoing pal of youth

leans in the doorframe

Kid, you always

took yourself so hard!

2003

SCREEN DOOR

Metallic slam on a moonless night

A short visit and so we departed.

A short year with many long

days

A long phone call with many pauses.

It was gesture’s code

we were used to using, we were

awkward without it.

Over the phone: knocking heard

at a door in another country.

Here it’s tonight: there tomorrow.

A vast world we used to think small.

That we knew everyone who mattered.

Firefly flicker. Metallic slam. A moonless night. Too dark

for gesture.

But it was gesture’s code we were used to.

Might need again. Urgent

hold-off or beckon.

Fierce supplication. One finger pointing: “Thither.”

Palms flung upward: “What now?”

Hand slicing the air or across the throat.

A long wave to the departing.

2003

VIII

TENDRIL

TENDRIL

1

Why does the outstretched finger of home

probe the dark hotel room like a flashlight beam

on the traveller, half-packed, sitting on the bed

face in hands, wishing her bag emptied again at home

Why does the young security guard

pray to keep standing watch forever, never to fly

Why does he wish he were boarding

as the passengers file past him into the plane

What are they carrying in their bundles

what vanities, superstitions, little talismans

What have the authorities intercepted

who will get to keep it

2

Half-asleep in the dimmed cabin

she configures a gecko

aslant the overhead bin tendrils of vine

curling up through the cabin floor

buried here in night as in a valley

remote from rescue

Unfound, confounded, vain, superstitious, whatever we were

before

now we are still, outstretched, curled, however we were

Unwatched the gecko, the inching of green

through the cracks in the fused imperious shell

3

Dreaming a womb’s languor valleyed in death

among fellow strangers

she has merely slept through the night

a nose nearby rasps, everyone in fact is breathing

the gecko has dashed into some crevice

of her brain, the tendrils retract

orange juice is passed on trays

declarations filled out in the sudden dawn

4

She can’t go on dreaming of mass death

this was not to have been her métier

she says to the mirror in the toilet

a bad light any way you judge yourself

and she’s judge, prosecutor, witness, perpetrator

of her time

‘s conspiracies of the ignorant

with the ruthless She’s the one she’s looking at

5

This confessional reeks of sweet antiseptic

and besides she’s not confessing

her mind balks craving wild onions

nostril-chill of eucalyptus

that seventh sense of what’s missing

against what’s supplied

She walks at thirty thousand feet into the cabin

sunrise crashing through the windows

Cut the harping she tells herself

You’re human, porous like all the rest

6

She was to have sat in a vaulted

library heavy scrolls wheeled to a desk

for sieving, sifting, translating

all morning then a quick lunch thick coffee

then light descending slowly

on earthen-colored texts

but that’s a dream of dust

frail are thy tents humanity

facing thy monologues of force

She must have fallen asleep reading

7

She must have fallen asleep reading

The woman who mopped the tiles

is deliquescent a scarlet gel

her ligaments and lungs

her wrought brain her belly’s pulse

disrupt among others mangled there

the chief librarian the beggar

the man with the list of questions

the scrolls never to be translated

and the man who wheeled the scrolls

8

She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove

a vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer

rearranging the past in a blip

coherence smashed into vestige

not for her even the thought

of her children’s children picking up

one shard of tile then another laying

blue against green seeing words

in three scripts flowing through vines and flowers

guessing at what it was

the levantine debris

Not for her but still for someone?

2003

NOTES ON THE POEMS

Tell Me

remembered if outlived / as freezing: Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), no. 341.

harrowed in defeats of language: Michael Heller, “Sag Harbor, Whitman, As If An Ode,” in Wordflow: New and Selected Poems (Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1997), p. 129.

in history to my barest marrow: Black Salt: Poems by Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.

This evening let’s

friendship is not a tragedy: See June Jordan, “Civil Wars” (1980), in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 267.

Delivered Clean

“Delivered vacant” is a developer’s phrase for a building for sale whose tenants have already been evicted. See Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 158.

Transparencies

we are truely sorry… Clyde Haberman, “Palestinians Reclaim Their Town after Israelis Withdraw,” New York Times, August 31, 2001, p. A6.

Collaborations

dimdumim: Hebrew for “dawn,” “dusk,” “twilight.”

what thou lovest well… See Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 112: “what thou lovest well remains…cannot be reft from thee.”

what does not change… See Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” in his Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 5: “What does not change / is the will to change.”

the fascination with what’s easiest… See W. B. Yeats, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” in his Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 104.

Alternating Current

The Villa Grimaldi outside Santiago, formerly a military officers’ club, was converted to a detention and torture facility during the Pinochet regime in Chile. It is now a memorial park honoring the victims of torture.

V

If some long unborn friend…: Muriel Rukeyser, “Tree of Days,” in Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems, ed. Adrienne Rich (New York: Library of America, 2004), p. 69.

After Apollinaire & Brassens

Derived from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” and Georges Brassens’s song “Le Pont des Arts.”

Slashes

October ’17 / May ’68 / September ’73: October 1917 marked the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a determinative event in twentieth-century history. May 1968 saw massive popular U.S. opposition to the war in Vietnam, linked with the movement for Black civil rights and with anticolonial struggles abroad; in France there were uprisings of workers and students. On September 11, 1973, in Chile, a military coup under General Augusto Pinochet backed by the CIA violently seized power from the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.

In wolf-tree, see the former field: See Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 18–19: “A ‘wolf’ tree is a tree within a woods, its size and form, large trunk and horizontal branches, anomalous to the environs of slim-trunked trees with upright branches…a clue to the open field in which it once grew alone, branches reaching laterally to the light and up.”

Dislocations: Seven Scenarios—5

You thought you were innocent… See Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 131.

Five O’Clock, January 2003

most glorious creature on earth: See Robinson Jeffers, “Ninth Anniversary,” in The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Albert Gelpi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 52: “there the most glorious / Creature on earth shines in the nights or glitters in the suns, / Or feels of its stone in the blind fog.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the following publications in which some of these poems have appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:

American Poetry Review

Bloom: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More

Boston Review

Brick (Toronto)

Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends

Connect: Art Politics Theory Practice

Hunger

Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (www.logosjournal.com)

Long Shot

Massachusetts Review

Michigan Quarterly Review

Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine

Poets Against the War (Nation Books, Sam Hamill, editor)

Present Tense: Poets in the World

(Mark Pawlak and Ron Schreiber, editors; Hanging Loose Press)

The Progressive

Seattle Journal for Social Justice

Tri-Quarterly, a publication of Northwestern University

Water-Stone

XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics

ZYZZYVA

Table of Contents

Praise

BY ADRIENNE RICH

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

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

USONIAN JOURNALS 2000 [Usonian

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 laughter in 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 1 Why does the outstretched finger of home probe the dark hotel room like a flashlight beam on the traveller

Notes on the Poems

Acknowledgments