FOX

BY ADRIENNE RICH

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

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984

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

Leaflets

Necessities of Life

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

The Diamond Cutters

A Change of World

FOX

POEMS 1998–2000

ADRIENNE RICH

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK • LONDON

Copyright © 2001 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: Leelo Märjamaa-Reintal.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

Fox: poems 1998–2000 / by Adrienne Rich.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-0-393-07078-1

I. Title.

PS3535.I233 F69 2001

811'.54—dc21

2001031240

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

W1T3QT

My appreciation to the journals where these poems first appeared:

Connect, Doubletake, Fence, Paris Review,

Poetry International, Sulfur, The American Poetry Review,

The Progressive, The Radcliffe Quarterly

For Michelle, again,

after twenty-five years

Y in alto cielo, su fondo estrellado

Y en las multitudes, la mujer que amo

CONTENTS

Victory

Veterans Day

For This

Regardless

Signatures

Nora’s Gaze

Architect

Fox

Messages

Fire

Twilight

Octobrish

Second Sight

Grating

Noctilucent Clouds

If Your Name Is on the List

1999

Terza Rima

Four Short Poems

Rauschenberg’s Bed

Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot

Ends of the Earth

Notes

FOX

VICTORY

Something spreading underground won’t speak to us

under skin won’t declare itself

not all life-forms want dialogue with the

machine-gods in their drama hogging down

the deep bush clear-cutting refugees

from ancient or transient villages into

our opportunistic fervor to search

crazily for a host a lifeboat

Suddenly instead of art we’re eyeing

organisms traced and stained on cathedral transparencies

cruel blues embroidered purples succinct yellows

a beautiful tumor

I guess you’re not alone I fear you’re alone

There’s, of course, poetry:

awful bridge rising over naked air: I first

took it as just a continuation of the road:

“a masterpiece of engineering

praised, etc.” then on the radio:

“incline too steep for ease of, etc.”

Drove it nonetheless because I had to

this being how—So this is how

I find you: alive and more

As if (how many conditionals must we suffer?)

I’m driving to your side

—an intimate collusion—

packed in the trunk my bag of foils for fencing with pain

glasses of varying spectrum for sun or fog or sun-struck

rain or bitterest night my sack of hidden

poetries, old glue shredding from their spines

my time exposure of the Leonids

over Joshua Tree

As if we’re going to win this O because

If you have a sister I am not she

nor your mother nor you my daughter

nor are we lovers or any kind of couple

except in the intensive care

of poetry and

death’s master plan architecture-in-progress

draft elevations of a black-and-white mosaic dome

the master left on your doorstep

with a white card in black calligraphy:

Make what you will of this

As if leaving purple roses

If (how many conditionals must we suffer?)

I tell you a letter from the master

is lying on my own doorstep

glued there with leaves and rain

and I haven’t bent to it yet

if I tell you I surmise

he writes differently to me:

Do as you will, you have had your life

many have not

signing it in his olden script:

Meister aus Deutschland

In coldest Europe end of that war

frozen domes iron railings frozen stoves lit in the streets

memory banks of cold

the Nike of Samothrace

on a staircase wings in blazing

backdraft said to me

: : to everyone she met

Displaced, amputated never discount me

Victory

indented in disaster striding at the head of stairs

for Tory Dent

1998

VETERANS DAY

1

No flag heavy or full enough to hide this face

this body swung home from home sewn into its skin

Let you entrusted to close the box

for final draping take care

what might be due

to the citizen wounded

by no foreign blast nor shell (is this

body a child’s? if? why?)

eyes hooded in refusal—

over these to lower the nation’s pall, thick flutter

this body shriveled into itself

—a normal process they have said

The face? another story, a flag

hung upside down against glory’s orders

2

Trying to think about

something else—what?—when

the story broke

the scissor-fingered prestidigitators

snipped the links of concentration

State vs memory

State vs unarmed citizen

wounded by no foreign blast nor shell

forced into the sick-field

brains-out coughing downwind

backing into the alley hands shielding eyes

under glare-lit choppers coming through low

3

In the dream you—is it?—set down

two packages in brown paper

saying, Without such means

there can be no end

to the wrenching of mind

from body, the degradation

no end to everything you hate

and have exposed, lie upon lie

I think: We’ve been dying slowly

now we’ll be blown to bits

I think you’re testing me

“how vitally we desired disaster”

You say, there can be no poetry

without the demolition

of language, no end to everything you hate

lies upon lies

I think: you’re testing me

testing us both

but isn’t this what it means to live—

pushing further the conditions in which we breathe?

4

In the college parlor by the fireplace

ankled and waisted with bells

he, inclined by nature toward tragic themes

chants of the eradication of tribal life

in a blue-eyed trance

shaking his neckbent silvering hair

Afterward, wine and cake at the Provost’s house

and this is surely no dream, how the beneficiary

of atrocities yearns toward innocence

and this is surely a theme, the vengeful rupture

of prized familiar ways

and calculated methods

for those who were there But for those elsewhere

it’s something else, not herds hunted down cliffs

maybe a buffalo burger in the

tribal college cafeteria

and computer skills after lunch Who wants to be tragic?

The college coheres out of old quonset huts

demolition-scavenged doors, donated labor

used textbooks, no waste, passion

5

Horned blazing fronds of Sierra ice

grow hidden rivulets, last evening’s raindrop pulses

in the echeveria’s cup next morning, fogdrip darkens the road

under fire-naked bishop pines

thick sweats form on skins of pitched-out nectarines, dumpster shrine

of miracles of truths of mold Rain streaming, stroking

a broken windowpane

When the story broke I thought

I was thinking about water

how it is most of what we are

and became bottled chic

such thoughts are soon interrupted

6

When the story broke we were trying to think

about history went on stubbornly thinking

though history plunged

with muddy spurs screamed at us for trying

to plunder its nest seize its nestlings

capture tame and sell them or something

after the manner of our kind

Well, was it our secret hope?

—a history you could seize

(as in old folios of “natural history”

each type and order pictured in its place?)

—Back to the shambles, comrades,

where the story is always breaking

down having to be repaired

7

Under the small plane’s fast shadow an autumn

afternoon bends sharply

—swathes of golden membrane, occult blood

seeping up through the great groves

where the intestinal the intestate

blood-cords of the stags are strung from tree to tree

I know already where we’re landing

what cargo we’ll take on

boxed for the final draping

coming home from home sewn into its skin

eyes hooded in refusal

—what might be due—

1998–1999

FOR THIS

If I’ve reached for your lines (I have)

like letters from the dead that stir the nerves

dowsed you for a springhead

to water my thirst

dug into my compost skeletons and petals

you surely meant to catch the light:

—at work in my wormeaten wormwood-raftered

stateless underground

have I a plea?

If I’ve touched your finger

with a ravenous tongue

licked from your palm a rift of salt

if I’ve dreamt or thought you

a pack of blood fresh-drawn

hanging darkred from a hook

higher than my heart

(you who understand transfusion)

where else should I appeal?

A pilot light lies low

while the gas jets sleep

(a cat getting toed from stove

into nocturnal ice)

language uncommon and agile as truth

melts down the most intractable silence

A lighthouse keeper’s ethics:

you tend for all or none

for this you might set your furniture on fire

A this we have blundered over

as if the lamp could be shut off at will

rescue denied for some

and still a lighthouse be

1999

REGARDLESS

An idea declared itself between us

clear as a washed wineglass

that we’d love

regardless of manifestos I wrote or signed

my optimism of the will

regardless

your wincing at manifestos

your practice of despair you named

anarchism

: : an idea we could meet

somewhere else a road

straggling unmarked through ice-plant

toward an ocean heartless as eternity

Still hungry for freedom I walked off

from glazed documents becalmed

passions time of splintering and sawdust

pieces lying still I was not myself but

I found a road like that it straggled

The ocean still

looked like eternity

I drew it on a

napkin mailed it to you

On your hands you wear work gloves stiffened

in liquids your own body has expressed

: : what stiffens hardest? tears? blood? urine? sweat? the

first drops from the penis?

Your glove then meets my hand this is our meeting

Which of us has gone furthest?

To meet you like this I’ve had to rise

from love in a room

of green leaves larger than my clitoris or my brain

in a climate where winter never precisely

does or does not engrave its name on the windowpane

while the Pacific lays down its right of way

to the other side of the world

: : to a table where singed manifestos

curl back crying to be reread

but can I even provoke you

joking or

in tears

you in long-stiffened gloves still

protector of despair?

for H.C.

1998–1999

SIGNATURES

It would have made no difference who commanded us in those first hours….

—veteran, invasion of Normandy, 1944

That was no country for old women…Someone from D-Day

at the redgold turn of the party

recites his line of Yeats with a sex-change

someone already stricken

in his urethra rising four times nightly

Went through that and still despises…

Here an old woman’s best country is her art

or it’s not her country

Here the old don’t pity the old

As when young we scale our rock face

relentless, avid

looking sometimes back at the whole terrain:

—those scrapings on the rocks

are they a poet’s signature?

a mother’s who tried for all her worth to cling

to the steep with the small soft claws gripping her back?

1998

NORA’S GAZE

Clayton, we can’t

have it both ways:

Nora’s art

was erotic

not sensual

yet how can that be?

Mostly, she handled

the body in a bleak light

—surely that was her right

to make such paintings, drawings more

than paintings anyway—

grey-brown, black, white-grey

—not the usual hues encoding

sensual encounter

but how she figured it

and stained it

And had she painted

the deep-dyed swollen shaft

the balls’ magenta shadow

in dark dominion

that

might have “done well”

But to paint and paint again

the penis as a workaday

routine

wintry morning thing

under a gaze

expert and merciful as hers

that was heinous

and her genius

still lies chained

till that is told

You a man

I a woman tell it

none of it lessens her

for Clayton Eshleman

1998

ARCHITECT

Nothing he had done before

or would try for later

will explain or atone

this facile suggestion of crossbeams

languid elevations traced on water

his stake in white colonnades cramping his talent

showing up in

facsimile mansions overbearing the neighborhood

his leaving the steel rods out of the plinths

(bronze raptors gazing from the boxwood)

You could say he spread himself too thin a plasterer’s term

you could say he was then

skating thin ice his stake in white colonnades against the

thinness of

ice itself a slickened ground

Could say he did not then love

his art enough to love anything more

Could say he wanted the commission so

badly betrayed those who hired him an artist

who in dreams followed

the crowds who followed him

Imagine commandeering those oversize those prized

hardwood columns to be hoisted and hung

by hands expert and steady on powerful machines

his knowledge using theirs as the one kind does the

other (as it did in Egypt)

—while devising the little fountain to run all night

outside the master bedroom

1998–1999

FOX

I needed fox Badly I needed

a vixen for the long time none had come near me

I needed recognition from a

triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes

fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail

I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said she

had run through

I was in want of fox

And the truth of briars she had to have run through

I craved to feel on her pelt if my hands could even slide

past or her body slide between them sharp truth distressing

surfaces of fur

lacerated skin calling legend to account

a vixen’s courage in vixen terms

For a human animal to call for help

on another animal

is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth

come a long way down

Go back far enough it means tearing and torn endless

and sudden

back far enough it blurts

into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child

pushed out of a female the yet-to-be woman

1998

MESSAGES

I love the infinity of these silent spaces

Darkblue shot with deathrays but only a short distance

Keep of course water and batteries, antibiotics

Always look at California for the last time

We weren’t birds, were we, to flutter past each other

But what were we meant to do, standing or lying down

Together on the bare slope where we were driven

The most personal feelings become historical

Keep your hands knotted deep inside your sweater

While the instruments of force are more credible than beauty

Inside a glass paperweight dust swirls and settles (Manzanar)

Where was the beauty anyway when we shouldered past

each other

Where is it now in the hollow lounge

Of the grounded airline where the cameras

For the desouling project are being handed out

Each of us instructed to shoot the others naked

If you want to feel the true time of our universe

Put your hands over mine on the stainless pelvic rudder

No, here (sometimes the most impassive ones will shudder)

The infinity of these spaces comforts me

Simple textures falling open like a sweater

1999

FIRE

in the old city incendiaries abound

who hate this place stuck to their foot soles

Michael Burnhard is being held and I

can tell you about him pushed-out and living

across the river low-ground given to flooding

in a shotgun house

his mother working for a hospital

or restaurant dumpsters she said a restaurant

hospital cafeteria who cares

what story

you bring home with the food

I can tell you Michael knows beauty

from the frog-iris in mud

the squelch of ankles

stalking the waterlily

the blues beat flung across water from the old city

Michael Burnhard in Black History Month

not his month only he was born there

not black and almost without birthday one

February 29 Michael Burnhard

on the other side of the river

glancing any night at his mother’s wrists

crosshatched raw

beside the black-opal stream

Michael Burnhard still beside himself

when fire took the old city

lying like a black spider on its back

under the satellites and a few true stars

1999

TWILIGHT

Mudseason dusk schoolmaster: pressed out of rain my

spine

on your grey dormitory

chiseled from Barre

caught now in your blurred story

hauling my jacket overshoulder

against your rectilinear stones

Out of the rain I waited

in a damp parlor ghosted

with little gifts and candy toys

pitting my brain against your will

Could rays from my pupils dissect

mortar pry boards from floor

probe the magnetic field of your

granitic clarity

Schoolmaster: could swear I’ve caught your upper-window

profile

bent down on this little kingdom dreamed your advice:

Always read with the dark falling over your left shoulder

—seen you

calculate volume of blocks required

inspect the glazing

pay the week’s wages

blueprints scrolled under arm

treading home over snow

driven virgin then cow-pied

five o’clock’s blue eyeballs

strung open day after day

a few seconds longer

an ascendant planet

following in your footprints possibly

1999

OCTOBRISH

—it is to have these dreams

still married/where

you tell me In those days

instead of working

I was playing on the shore with a wolf

coming to a changed

house/you

glad of the changes

but still almost

transparent

and bound to disappear

A life thrashes/half unlived/its passions

don’t desist/displaced from their own habitat

like other life-forms take up other dwellings

so in my body’s head

so in the stormy spaces

that life

leads itself which could not be led

1999

SECOND SIGHT

1

Tonight I could write many verses

beginning Let this not happen

for a woman leaning over a thirtieth story railing

in hot July worn webbed-plastic

chairs aglare on the nickel-colored balcony

foreseeing in tracked patterns

of a project landscape

the hammer brought

down by one child upon another’s skull

Not moved yet she and hers

her child inside gazing

at a screen

and she a reader once now a woman foreseeing

elbows sore with the weight

she has placed on them

a woman on a balcony with a child inside

gazing at a screen

2

A woman neither architect nor engineer construes the

dustmotes

of a space primed for neglect

Indoor, outdoor exhausted air

Paths that have failed as paths trees

that have failed as trees

Practiced in urban literacy she

traverses and assesses streets and bridges

tilting the cumbrous ornamental sewer lids ajar

in search of reasons underground

which there why this must be

1999–2000

GRATING

I

Not having worn

the pearly choker

of innocence around my throat

willed by a woman

whose leavings I can’t afford

Not having curled up like that girl

in maternal gauze

Not

having in great joy gazing

on another woman’s thick fur

believed I was unsexed for that

Now let me not

you not I but who ought to be

hang like a leaf twisting

endlessly toward the past

nor reach for a woman’s skinned-off mask

to hide behind

You

not I but who ought to be

get me out of this, human

through some

air vent, grating

II

There’s a place where beauty names itself:

“I am beauty,” and becomes irreproachable

to the girl transfixed beside the mother

the artist and her mother

There must be a color for the mother’s

otherness must be some gate of chalk some slit or stain

through which the daughter sees outside that otherness

Long ago must have been burnt a bunch of rags

still smelling of umbrage

that can be crushed into a color

there must be such a color

if, lying full length

on the studio floor

the artist were to paint herself

in monochrome

from a mirror in the ceiling

an elongated figure suspended across the room

first horizontal

then straight up and naked

free of beauty

ordinary in fact

III

The task is to row a strong-boned, legally blind

hundred-and-one-year-old woman

across the Yangtze River

An emergency or not, depending

Others will have settled her in the boat with pillows but

the arms

wielding the oars will be yours

crepitus of the shoulders yours

the conversation still hers

Three days’ labor

with you…that was torture

—to pilot through current and countercurrent

requiring silence and concentration

There is a dreadfulness that charm o’erlies

—as might have been said in an older diction

Try to row deadweight someone without

death skills

Shouldering the river a pilot figures

how

The great rock shoulders overlook

in their immensity all decisions

1999–2000

NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS

Late night on the underside a spectral glare

abnormal Everything below

must and will betray itself

as a floodlit truckstop out here

on the North American continent stands revealed

and we’re glad because it’s late evening and no town

but this, diesel, regular, soda, coffee, chips, beer and video

no government no laws but LIGHT in the continental dark

and then and then what smallness the soul endures

rolling out on the ramp from such an isle

onto the harborless Usonian plateau

Dear Stranger can I raise a poem

to justice you not here

with your sheet-lightning apprehension

of nocturne

your surveyor’s eye for distance

as if any forest’s fallen tree were for you

a possible hypotenuse

Can I wake as I once woke with no thought of you

into the bad light of a futureless motel

This thing I am calling justice:

I could slide my hands into your leather gloves

but my feet would not fit into your boots

Every art leans on some other: yours

on mine in spasm retching

last shreds of vanity

We swayed together like cripples when the wind

suddenly turned a corner or was it we who turned

Once more I invite you into this

in retrospect it will be clear

1999

IF YOUR NAME IS ON THE LIST

If your name is on the list of judges

you’re one of them

though you fought their hardening

assumptions went and stood

alone by the window while they

concurred

It wasn’t enough to hold your singular

minority opinion

You had to face the three bridges

down the river

your old ambitions

flamboyant in bloodstained mist

You had to carry off under arm

and write up in perfect loneliness

your soul-splitting dissent

Yes, I know a soul can be partitioned like a country

In all the new inhere old judgments

loyalties crumbling send up sparks and smoke

We want to be part of the future dragging in

what pure futurity can’t use

Suddenly a narrow street a little beach a little century

screams Don’t let me go

Don’t let me die Do you forget

what we were to each other

1999

Before the acute

point of the severing

I wanted to see into my century’s

hinged and beveled mirror

clear of smoke

eyes of coal and ruby

stunned neck the carrier of bricks and diamonds

brow of moonlit oyster shells

barbed wire lacework disgracing

the famous monument

Behind it spread the old

indigenous map landscape

before conquerors horizon ownless

TERZA RIMA

1

Hail-spurting sky sun

splashing off persimmons left

in the quit garden

of the quit house The realtor’s swaying name

against this cloudheap this

surrendered acre

I would so help me tell you if I could

how some great teacher

came to my side and said:

Let’s go down into the underworld

—the earth already crazed

Let me take your hand

—but who would that be?

already trembling on the broken crust

who would I trust?

I become the default derailed memory-raided

limping

teacher I never had I lead and I follow

2

Call it the earthquake trail:

I lead through live-oak meadows

to the hillside where the plates shuddered

rewind the seismic story

point to the sundered

fence of 1906 the unmatching rocks

trace the loop under dark bay branches

blurred with moss

behaving like a guide

Like a novice I lag

behind with the little snake

dead on the beaten path

This will never happen again

3

At the end of the beaten path we’re sold free

tickets for the celebration

of the death of history

The last page of the calendar

will go up a sheet of flame

(no one will be permitted on the bridge)

We’ll assemble by letters

alphabetical

each ticket a letter

to view ourselves as giants

on screen-surround

in the parking lot

figures of men and women firmly pushing

babies in thickly padded prams

through disintegrating malls

into the new era

4

I have lost our way the fault is mine

ours the fault belongs

to us I become the guide

who should have defaulted

who should have remained the novice

I as guide failed

I as novice trembled

I should have been stronger held us

together

5

I thought I was

stronger my will the ice-sail

speeding my runners

along frozen rivers

bloodied by sunset

thought I could be forever

will-ful my sail filled

with perfect ozone my blades

flashing clean into the ice

6

Was that youth? that clear

sapphire on snow

a distinct hour

in Central Park that smell

on sidewalk and windowsill

fresh and unmixt

the blizzard’s peace and drama

over the city

a public privacy

waiting

in the small steamed-up copy shop

slush tracked in across a wooden floor

then shivering elated

in twilight

at the bus stop with others a public happiness

7

Not simple is it to do

a guide’s work the novices

irrupting hourly with their own bad vigor

knowing not who they are

every phase of moon an excuse

for fibrillating

besides the need in today’s world

to consider

outreach the new thinking

—Or: love will strongly move you

or commerce will

You want a priest? go to the altar

where eternal bargains are struck

want love?

go down inside your destructible heart

8

In Almodóvar’s film

we go for truth to the prostitutes’ field

to find past and future

elegant beaten-up and knifed

sex without gender

preyed-on and preying

transactions zones of play

the circling drivers

in search of their desires

theater of love Ninth Circle

there are so many teachers

here no fire can shrink them

Do you understand? you could get your face

slashed in such a place

Do you think this is a movie?

9

She says: I gave my name and it was taken

I no longer have my name

I gave my word and it was broken

My words are learning

to walk on crutches

through traffic

without stammering

My name is a prisoner

who will not name names

She says: I gave my tongue

to love and this

makes it hard to speak

She says: When my life depended

on one of two

opposite terms

I dared mix beauty with courage

they were my lovers

together they were tortured

10

Sick of my own old poems caught

on rainshower Fifth Avenue

in a bookstore

I reach to a shelf

and there you are Pier Paolo

speaking to Gramsci’s ashes

in the old encircling rhyme

Vivo nel non volere del

tramontato dopoguerra:

amando

il mondo che odio…

that vernacular voice

intimately political

and that was how you died

so I clasp my book to my heart

as the shop closes

11

Under the blackened dull-metal corners

of the small espresso pot

a jet flares blue

a smell tinctures the room

—some sniff or prescience of

a life that actually could be

lived a grain of hope

a bite of bitter chocolate in the subway

to pull on our senses

without them we’re prey

to the failed will

its science of despair

12

How I hate it when you ascribe to me

a “woman’s vision”

cozy with coffeepots drawn curtains

or leaning in black leather dress

over your chair

black fingernail tracing your lines

overspent Sibyl drifting in a bottle

How I’ve hated speaking “as a woman”

for mere continuation

when the broken is what I saw

As a woman do I love

and hate? as a woman

do I munch my bitter chocolate underground?

Yes. No. You too

sexed as you are hating

this whole thing you keep on it remaking

13

Where the novice pulls the guide

across frozen air

where the guide suddenly grips the shoulder

of the novice where the moss is golden

the sky sponged with pink at sunset

where the urine of reindeer barely vanished

stings the air like a sharp herb

where the throat of the clear-cut opens

across the surrendered forest

I’m most difficultly

with you I lead

and I follow

our shadows reindeer-huge

slip onto the map

of chance and purpose figures

on the broken crust

exchanging places bites to eat

a glance

2000

FOUR SHORT POEMS

l

(driving home from Robin Blaser’s reading)

The moon

is not romantic. No. It’s

a fact of life and still

we aren’t inured. You would think, it reflects

the waves not draws them. So

I’d compel you as I

have been compelled by you. On the coast road

between drafts of fog

that face (and yes, it is

expressioned) breaking in and out

doth speak to us

as he did in his courtliness

and operatic mystery.

2

We’re not yet out of the everglades

of the last century

our body parts are still there

though we would have our minds careen and swoop

over the new ocean

with a wild surmise

the bloody strings

tangled and stuck between

become our lyre

3

Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand

piano

in a small California town by a boy from Prague

here for a month to learn American

This is not “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction”

This is one who startles the neighbors with his owning

of the transmissible heritage one evening

then for the whole month droops over the Internet.

4

From the new crudities, from the old

apartheid spraying ruin on revolution,

back to Du Bois of Great Barrington and Africa

or Kafka of the intransmissible

tradition

the stolen secrets in the cleft

reside and this, beloved poets

is where our hearts, livers and lights still

dwell unbeknownst and vital

for Elizabeth Willis and for Peter Gizzi

2000

RAUSCHENBERG’S BED

How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes

unsleepable site of anarchy What body holes expressed

their exaltation loathing exhaustion

what horse of night has pawed those sheets

what talk under the blanket raveled

what clitoris lain very still in her own subversion

what traveler homeward reached for familiar bedding

and felt stiff tatters under his fingers

How a bed is horizontal yet this is vertical

inarticulate liquids spent from a spectral pillow

How on a summer night someone drives out on the roads

while another one lies ice-packed in dreams of freezing

Sometimes this bed has eyes, sometimes breasts

sometimes eking forth from its laden springs

pity compassion pity again for all they have worn and borne

Sometimes it howls for penis sometimes vagina sometimes

for the nether hole the everywhere

How the children sleep and wake

the children sleep awake upstairs

How on a single night the driver of roads comes back

into the sweat-cold bed of the dreamer

leans toward what’s there for warmth

human limbs human crust

2000

WAITING FOR YOU AT THE MYSTERY SPOT

I sat down facing the steep place where

tours clambered upward and others straggled down, the

redwoods outstanding all

A family, East Asian, holding a picnic at their van:

“We are always hungry,” the older sister said laughing,

“and we always bring our food”

Roses clambered a rough fence in the slanting sun that

speared the redwoods

We’d gone into the gift shop while waiting for your tour

found Davy Crockett coonskin caps, deerskin coin purses

scorpions embedded in plastic, MYSTERY SPOT bumper

stickers

and postcards of men you wouldn’t be left alone with

a moment if you could help it, illustrating

the Mystery Spot and its tricks with gravity and horizon

Your tour was called and you started upward. I went

back

to my redwood bench

“The mystai streamed”

toward the

mystery

But if anything up there was occult

nothing at ground level was: tiny beings flashing around

in the sun secure knowing their people were nearby

grandfathers, aunts, elder brothers or sisters, parents and

loved friends

You could see how it was when each tour was called and

gathered itself

who rode on what shoulders, ran alongside, held hands

the languages all different, English the least of these

I sat listening to voices watching the miraculous migration

of sunshafts through the redwoods the great spears

folding up

into letters from the sun deposited through dark green

slots

each one saying

I love you but

I must draw away Believe, I will return

Then: happiness! your particular figures

in the descending crowd: Anne, Jacob, Charlie!

Anne with her sandals off

in late day warmth and odor and odd wonder

2000

ENDS OF THE EARTH

All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken television set.

Coarse-frosted karst crumbling as foam, eel eyes piercing the rivers.

Dark or light, leaving or landfall, male or female demarcations dissolve

into the O of time and solitude. I found here: no inter/

ruption to a version of earth so abandoned and abandoning

I read it my own acedia lashed by the winds

questing shredmeal toward the Great Plains, that ocean. My

fear.

Call it Galisteo but that’s not the name of what happened

here.

If indoors in an eyeflash (perhaps) I caught the gazer of spaces

lighting the two wax candles in black iron holders

against the white wall after work and after dark

but never saw the hand

how inhale the faint mist of another’s gazing, pacing, dozing

words muttered aloud in utter silence, gesture unaware

thought that has suffered and borne itself to the ends of

the earth

web agitating between my life and another’s?

Other whose bed I have shared but never at once together?

NOTES

Again, I thank the Lannan Foundation for their encouragement and for the breadth of their vision.

The lines in Spanish in the dedication are from Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a la Vida.”

NORA’S GAZE

Alludes to works by the painter Nora Jaffe (1928–1994). See Clayton Eshleman, “Nora’s Roar,” in his From Scratch (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), pp. 31–49.

MESSAGES

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662): Le silence éternel de ces espaces m’affraye. (The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me). See Pensées of Blaise Pascal, trans. W. F. Trotter, Everyman’s Library no. 874 (London: Dent, 1948), p. 61.

MANZANAR

Site of the First War Relocation Center activated in World War II for the internment of Japanese Americans, Manzanar is located east of the Sierra Nevada range and northeast of Death Valley.

TWILIGHT

Brownington, Vermont, is the site of the “Old Stone House” completed in 1836 as a dormitory for the Orleans County Grammar School. Its architect and builder, African American Alexander Lucius Twilight, served as principal of the school for most of its existence (“The Old Stone House Museum” [Orleans, Vt.: Orleans County Historical Society, 1996]). A working granite quarry still operates in Barre, Vermont.

NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS

“Several times in the last few months, observers in the lower 48 have seen ‘noctilucent clouds,’ which develop about 50 miles above the earth’s surface—clouds so high that they reflect the sun’s rays long after nightfall…. [G]lobal warming seems to be driving them toward the equator…. In retrospect it will be clear.” Bill McKibben, “Indifferent to a Planet in Pain,” New York Times, Saturday, 4 September 1999, sec. A.

“Usonian”: The term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired American architecture.

TERZA RIMA, 3

Vivo nel non volare…: “I live in the failed will / of the post-war time: / loving the world I hate”—Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le Ceneri di Gramsci,” in Lawrence R. Smith, ed. and trans., The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 80–81. See also Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems, selected and trans. Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo (London: John Calder, 1982), pp. 10–11.

WAITING FOR YOU AT THE MYSTERY SPOT:

“The mystai streamed toward [the Telestrion].” C. Kerényi, Eleusis, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen series 65, vol. 4 (New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon, 1967), p. 82.

Table of Contents

Cover

FOX

BY ADRIENNE RICH

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

CONTENTS

FOX

Victory

Veterans Day

For This

Regardless

Signatures

Nora’s Gaze

Architect

Fox

Messages

Fire

Twilight

Octobrish

Second Sight

Grating

Noctilucent Clouds

If Your Name Is on the List

1999

Terza Rima

Four Short Poems

Rauschenberg’s Bed

Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot

Ends of the Earth

Notes