Adrienne Rich

POEMS 1985–1988

Time’s Power

W • W • NORTON & COMPANY | NEW YORK • LONDON

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

CONTENTS

Solfeggietto

This

Love Poem

Negotiations

In a Classroom

The Novel

A Story

In Memoriam: D.K.

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

Sleepwalking     Next to Death

Letters in the Family

The Desert as Garden of Paradise

Delta

6/21

For an Album

Dreamwood

Walking Down the Road

The Slides

Harpers Ferry

One Life

Divisions of Labor

Living Memory

Turning

Notes

For Michelle

Time’s Power

SOLFEGGIETTO

1.

Your windfall at fifteen     your Steinway grand

paid for by fire insurance

came to me as birthright      a black cave

with teeth of ebony and ivory

twanging and thundering over the head

of the crawling child     until

that child was set on the big book on the chair

to face the keyboard world of black and white

—already knowing the world was black and white

The child’s hands    smaller than a sand-dollar

set on the keys     wired to their mysteries

the child’s wits facing the ruled and ruling staves

2.

For years we battled over music lessons

mine, taught by you      Nor did I wonder

what that keyboard meant to you

the hours of solitude     the practising

your life of prize-recitals     lifted hopes

Piatti’s nephew praising you at sixteen

scholarships to the North

Or what it was to teach

boarding-school girls what won’t be used

shelving ambition     beating time

to “On the Ice at Sweet Briar” or

“The Sunken Cathedral” for a child

counting the minutes and the scales to freedom

3.

Freedom: what could that mean, for you or me?

—Summers of ’36, ’37, Europe untuned

what I remember isn’t lessons

not Bach or Brahms or Mozart

but the rented upright in the summer rental

One Hundred Best-Loved Songs on the piano rack

And so you played, evenings        and so we sang

“Steal Away” and “Swanee River,”

“Swing Low,” and most of all

“Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord”

How we sang out the chorus     how I loved

the watchfires of the hundred circling camps

and truth is marching on and let us die to make men free

4

Piano lessons    The mother and the daughter

Their doomed exhaustion     their common mystery

worked out in finger-exercises     Czerny, Hanon

The yellow Schirmer albums    quarter-rests    double-holds

glyphs of an astronomy     the mother cannot teach

the daughter because this is not the story

of a mother teaching magic to her daughter

Side by side I see us locked

My wrists     your voice    are tightened

Passion lives in old songs     in the kitchen

where another woman cooks     teaches    and sings

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd

and in the booklined room

where the Jewish father reads and smokes and teaches

Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Songs

The daughter struggles with the strange notations

—dark chart of music’s ocean     flowers and flags

but would rather learn by ear and heart     The mother

says she must learn to read by sight     not ear and heart

5

Daughter who fought her mother’s lessons—

even today a scrip of music balks me—

I feel illiterate in this

your mother-tongue     Had it been Greek or Slovak

no more could your native alphabet have baffled

your daughter     whom you taught for years

held by a tether     over the ivory

and ebony teeth of the Steinway

It is

the three hundredth anniversary of Johann

Sebastian Bach     My earliest life

woke to his English Suites     under your fingers

I understand a language I can’t read

Music you played streams on the car radio

in the freeway night

You kept your passions deep     You have them still

I ask you, both of us

—Did you think mine was a virtuoso’s hand?

Did I see power in yours?

What was worth fighting for?     What did you want?

What did I want from you?

1985–1988

THIS

Face flashing free    child-arms

lifting the collie pup

torn paper on the path

Central Park     April ’72

behind you     minimal

those benches and that shade

that brilliant light in which

you laughed longhaired

and I’m the keeper of

this little piece of paper

this little piece of truth

I wanted this from you—

laughter    a child turning

into a boy     at ease

in the spring light     with friends

I wanted this for you

I could mutter     Give back

that day    give me again

that child    with the chance

of making it all right

I could yell     Give back that light

on the dog’s teeth    the child’s hair

but no rough drafts are granted

—Do you think I don’t remember?

did you think I was all-powerful

unimpaired     unappalled ?

yes    you needed that from me

I wanted this from you

1985

LOVE POEM

Tell me, bristler, where

do you get such hair

so quick a flare    so strong a tongue

Green eyes     fierce curls

there and here a mole

a girl’s

dimples     a warrior’s mind

dark blood under gold skin

testing, testing the world

the word

and so to write for you

a pretty sonnet

would be untrue

to your mud-river flashing

over rocks     your delicate

coffee-bushes

and more I cannot know

and some I labor with

and I mean to stay true

even in poems, to you

But there’s something more

Beauty, when you were young

we both thought we were young

now that’s all done

we’re serious now

about death     we talk to her

daily, as to a neighbor

we’re learning to be true

with her     she has the keys

to this house     if she must

she can sleep over

1986

NEGOTIATIONS

Someday if someday comes we will agree

that trust is not about safety

that keeping faith is not about deciding

to clip our fingernails exactly

to the same length or wearing

a uniform that boasts our unanimity

Someday if someday comes we’ll know

the difference between liberal laissez-faire

pluralism and the way you cut your hair

and the way I clench my hand

against my cheekbone

both being possible gestures of defiance

Someday if there’s a someday we will

bring food, you’ll say I can’t eat what you’ve brought

I’ll say Have some in the name of our

trying to be friends, you’ll say What about you?

we’ll taste strange meat and we’ll admit

we’ve tasted stranger

Someday if someday ever comes we’ll go

back and reread those poems and manifestos

that so enraged us in each other’s hand

I’ll say, But damn, you wrote it so I

couldn’t write it off     You’ll say

I read you always, even when I hated you

1986

IN A CLASSROOM

Talking of poetry, hauling the books

arm-full to the table where the heads

bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,

talking of consonants, elision,

caught in the how, oblivious of why:

I look in your face, Jude,

neither frowning nor nodding,

opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:

a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking

What I cannot say, is me. For that I came.

1986

THE NOVEL

All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and

Peace

Prince Andrei’s cold eyes taking in the sky from the battlefield

were your eyes, you went walking wrapped in his wound

like a padded coat against the winds from the two rivers

You went walking in the streets as if you were ordinary

as if you hadn’t been pulling with your raw mittened hand

on the slight strand that held your tattered mind

blown like an old stocking from a wire

on the wind between two rivers.

All winter you asked nothing

of that book though it lay heavy on your knees

you asked only for a shed skin, many skins in which to walk

you were old woman, child, commander

you watched Natasha grow into a neutered thing

you felt your heart go still while your eyes swept the pages

you felt the pages thickening to the left and on the right-

hand growing few, you knew the end was coming

you knew beyond the ending lay

your own, unwritten life

1986

A STORY

Absence is homesick. Absence wants a home,

but Absence left without a glance at Home.

Home tried to hold in Absence’s despite,

Home caved, shuddered, yet held

without Absence’s consent. Home took a walk

in several parks, Home shivered

in outlying boroughs, slept on strange floors,

cried many riffs of music, many words.

Home went out to teach school, Home studied pain control

Home learned to dive and came up blind with blood

Home learned to live on each location

but whenever Absence called, Home had to answer

in the grammar of Absence.

Home would hitch-hike

through flying snow, Home would roast meat,

light candles, to withstand the cold. Home washed the dishes

faithfully. But Absence

always knew when to call.

What if Absence calls

and a voice answers

in the accent of Home?

1986

IN MEMORIAM: D.K.

A man walking on the street

feels unwell     has felt unwell

all week, a little     Yet the flowers crammed

in pots on the corner:     furled anemones:

he knows they open

burgundy, violet, pink, amarillo

all the way to their velvet cores

The flowers hanging over the fence:     fuchsias:

each tongued, staring,     all of a fire:

the flowers     He who has

been happy oftener than sad

carelessly happy     well oftener than sick

one of the lucky     is thinking about death

and its music     about poetry

its translations of his life

And what good will it do you

to go home and put on the Mozart Requiem?

Read Keats?     How will culture cure you?

Poor, unhappy

unwell culture     what can it sing or say

six weeks from now, to you?

Give me your living hand     If I could take the hour

death moved into you     undeclared, unnamed

—even if sweet, if I could take that hour

between my forceps     tear at it like a monster

wrench it out of your flesh     dissolve its shape in quicklime

and make you well again

no, not again

but still. . . .

1986

CHILDREN PLAYING CHECKERS AT THE EDGE OF THE FOREST

Two green-webbed chairs

a three-legged stool between

Your tripod

Spears of grass

longer than your bare legs

cast shadows on your legs

drawn up

from the red-and-black

cardboard squares

the board of play

the board of rules

But you’re not playing, you’re talking

It’s midsummer

and greater rules are breaking

It’s the last

innocent summer you will know

and I

will go on awhile pretending that’s not true

When I have done pretending

I can see this:

the depth of the background

shadows

not of one moment only

erased and charcoaled in again

year after year

how the tree looms back behind you

the first tree of the forest

the last tree

from which the deer step out

from protection

the first tree

into dreadfulness

The last and the first tree

1987

SLEEPWALKING   NEXT TO DEATH

Sleep     horns of a snail

protruding, retracting

What we choose to know

or not know

all these years

sleepwalking

next to death

I

This snail could have been eaten

This snail could have been crushed

This snail could have dreamed it was a painter or a poet

This snail could have driven fast at night

putting up graffiti with a spray-gun:

This snail could have ridden

in the back of the pick-up, handing guns

II

Knows, chooses not to know

It has always

been about death and chances

The Dutch artist wrote and painted

one or more strange and usable things

For I mean to meet you

in any land     in any language

This is my promise:

I will be there

if you are there

III

In between this and that there are different places

of waiting, airports mostly where the air

is hungover, visibility low     boarding passes not guaranteed

If you wrote me, I sat next to Naomi

I would read that, someone who felt like Ruth

I would begin reading you like a dream

That’s how extreme it feels

that’s what I have to do

IV

Every stone around your neck you know the reason for

at this time in your life      Relentlessly

you tell me their names and furiously I

forget their names     Forgetting the names of the stones

you love, you lover of stones

what is it I do?

V

What is it I do? I refuse to take your place

in the world     I refuse to make myself

your courier    I refuse so much

I might ask, what is it I do?

I will not be the dreamer for whom

you are the only dream

I will not be your channel

I will wrestle you to the end

for our difference (as you have wrestled me)

I will change your name and confuse

the Angel

VI

I am stupid with you and practical with you

I remind you to take a poultice     forget a quarrel

I am a snail in the back of the pick-up handing you

vitamins you hate to take

VII

Calmly you look over my shoulder     at this page     and say

It’s all about you    None of this

tells my story

VIII

Yesterday noon I stood by a river

and many waited to cross over

from the Juarez barrio

to El Paso del Norte

First day of spring     a stand of trees

in Mexico were in palegreen leaf

a man casting a net

into the Rio Grande

and women, in pairs, strolling

across the border

as if taking a simple walk

Many thousands go

I stood by the river and thought of you

young     in Mexico     in a time of hope

IX

The practical nurse is the only nurse

with her plastic valise of poultices and salves

her hands of glove leather and ebony

her ledgers of pain

The practical nurse goes down to the river

in her runover shoes and her dollar necklace

eating a burrito in hand

it will be a long day

a long labor

the midwife will be glad to see her

it will be a long night      someone bleeding

from a botched abortion      a beating      Will you let her touch you

now?

Will you tell her you’re fine?

X

I’m afraid of the border patrol

Not those men

of La Migra who could have run us

into the irrigation canal with their van

I’m afraid

of the patrollers

the sleepwalker in me

the loner in you

XI

I want five hours with you

in a train running south

maybe ten hours

in a Greyhound bound for the border

the two seats side-by-side that become a home

an island of light in the continental dark

the time that takes the place of a lifetime

I promise I won’t fall asleep when the lights go down

I will not be lulled

Promise you won’t jump the train

vanish into the bus depot at three a.m.

that you won’t defect

that we’ll travel

like two snails

our four horns erect

1987

LETTERS IN THE FAMILY

I: Catalonia 1936

Dear Parents:

I’m the daughter

you didn’t bless when she left,

an unmarried woman wearing a khaki knapsack

with a poor mark in Spanish.

I’m writing now

from a plaster-dusted desk in a town

pocked street by street with hand grenades,

some of them, dear ones, thrown by me.

This is a school: the children are at war.

You don’t need honors in schoolroom Spanish here

to be of use and my right arm

’s as strong as anyone’s. I sometimes think

all languages are spoken here,

even mine, which you got zero in.

Don’t worry. Don’t try to write. I’m happy,

if you could know it.

Rochelle.

II: Yugoslavia, 1944

Dear Chana,

where are you now?

Am sending this pocket-to-pocket

(though we both know pockets we’d hate to lie in).

They showed me that poem you gave Reuven,

about the match:

Chana, you know, I never was

for martyrdom. I thought we’d try our best,

ragtag mission that we were,

then clear out if the signals looked too bad.

Something in you drives things ahead for me

but if I can I mean to stay alive.

We’re none of us giants, you know,

just small, frail, inexperienced romantic people.

But there are things we learn.

You know the sudden suck of empty space

between the jump and the ripcord pull?

I hate it. I hate it so,

I’ve hated you for your dropping

ecstatically in free-fall, in the training,

your look, dragged on the ground, of knowing

precisely why you were there.

My mother’s

still in Palestine. And yours

still there in Hungary. Well, there we are.

When this is over—

I’m

your earthbound friend to the end, still yours—

Esther.

III: Southern Africa, 1986

Dear children:

We’ve been walking nights

a long time over rough terrain,

sometimes through marshes. Days we hide

under what bushes we can find.

Our stars steer us. I write

on my knee by a river with a weary hand,

and the weariness will come through

this letter that should tell you

nothing but love. I can’t say where we are,

what weeds are in bloom, what birds cry at dawn.

The less you know the safer.

But not to know how you are going on—

Matile’s earache, Emma’s lessons, those tell-tale

eyes and tongues, so quick—are you remembering

to be brave and wise and strong?

At the end of this hard road

we’ll sit all together at one meal

and I’ll tell you everything: the names

of our comrades, how the letters

were routed to you, why I left.

And I’ll stop and say, “Now you,

grown so big, how was it for you, those times?

Look, I know you in detail, every inch of each

sweet body, haven’t I washed and dried you

a thousand times?”

And we’ll eat and tell our stories

together. That is my reason.

Ma.

1987

THE DESERT AS GARDEN OF PARADISE

1.

Guard the knowledge

from the knowledgeable,

those who gobble:

make it unpalatable.

Stars in this place

might look

distant to me as you,

to you as me.

Monotheism. Where it began.

But all the spirits, too.

Desert says: What you believe

I can prove. I: amaranth flower,

I: metamorphic rock, I: burrow,

I: water-drop in tilted catchment,

I: vulture, I: driest thorn.

Rocks in a trance. Escaped

from the arms of other rocks.

Roads leading to gold and to false gold.

2.

I ask you to sing, Chavela, in the desert

on tapes pirated from smuggled LP’s

I bring you here with me: I ask you to sing

It’s not for me, your snarling contralto

caught on a backdrop of bitter guitar

not for me     yet I pray let me listen

I don’t pray often     Never to male or female

sometimes to music or the flask of sunset

quick winter evenings     draining into the ground

our blood is mixed in, borderland magenta

and vermilion, never to become one

yet what we’re singing, dying in, that color

two-worlded, never one     Where from bars

lit by candle and earthquake your music finds me

whom it didn’t look for     This is why I ask you,

when the singing escapes the listener and goes

from the throat to where the mountains hang in chains

as if they never listened     why the song

wants so much to go where no song has ever gone.

3.

In this pale clear light where all mistakes are bathed

this afterglow of westernness

I write to you, head wrapped in your darkred scarf

framed by the sharp spines of the cholla

you love, the cruel blonde

spirit of the Mohave blossoming

in the spring twilights

of much earlier ages

Off at this distance I’m safe

to conjure the danger

you undergo daily, chin outthrust

eyelid lowered against the storm

that takes in an inkling whole ranches down

with the women the men and the children

the horses and cattle

—that much, flash-flood, lightning

all that had been done right, gone to hell

all crimes washed down the gulch

of independence, lost horse trail

Well, this was your country, Malinche,

and is, where you choose to speak

4.

Every drought-resistant plant has its own story

each had to learn to live

with less and less water, each would have loved

to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip

after the thunderstorm

each could do without deprivation

but where drought is the epic then there must be some

who persist, not by species-betrayal

but by changing themselves

minutely, by a constant study

of the price of continuity

a steady bargain with the way things are

5.

Then there were those, white-skinned

riding on camels

fast under scorching skies

their lives a tome of meaning

holding all this in fief:

star-dragged heavens, embroidered saddle-bags

coffee boiled up in slim urns

the salt, the oil, the roads

linking Europe with Asia

Crusaders, Legionnaires

desert-rats of empire

sucking the kid’s bones, drunk with meaning

fucking the Arab, killing the Jew

6.

Deutsches Blut, Ahmad the Arab

tells Arnold the Jew

tapping the blue

veins of his own brown wrist

in his own walled garden

spread with figured carpets

summer, starlight, 1925

Was it the Crusader line?

Did they think it made them brothers?

Arnold the Jew my father

told me the story, showed me

his photograph of Ahmad: Deutsches Blut

7.

Then there were those, black-robed

on horseback, tracing the great plateaus

cut by arroyos, cleft by ravines

facing Sierra San Pedro San Mártir

a fixed bar welding Baja California

to the mainland north:

a land the most unfortunate

ungrateful and miserable of this world

Padre Miguel Venegas wrote

yet they ordered the missions raised

from fragile ramadas

the thin stream drawn from the watering-hole

into gardens of fig, palm, sugarcane

tried to will what cannot be willed

killed many in the trying:

unpacked smallpox, measles, typhus

from the chests with the linens and chalices

packed the sufferers in plague-ridden rooms

baptized in one village walk

all the children, who then died.

(San Ignacio!     Soledad!)

There were those: convinced the material

was base, the humanity less

—Out of what can I bring forth a Christian soul?

For these, naked and dark

I come to do the work of Cross and Crown?

winning hearts and minds

peeling the prickly pear

and dousing it in wine

8.

What would it mean to think

you are part of a generation

that simply must pass on?

What would it mean to live

in the desert, try to live

a human life, something

to hand on to the children

to take up to the Land?

What would it mean to think

you were born in chains and only time,

nothing you can do

could redeem the slavery

you were born into?

9.

Out of a knot of deadwood

on ghostly grey-green stems

the nightblooming cereus opens

On a still night, under Ursa Major

the tallest saguaro cracks with cold

The eaters of herbs are eaten

the carnivores’ bones fall down

and scavengers pick them clean

This is not for us, or if it is

with whom, and where, is the covenant?

10.

When it all stands clear you come to love

the place you are:

the bundle of bare sticks soaked

with resin

always, and never, a bush on fire

the blue sky without tale or text

and without meaning

the great swing of the horizontal circle

Miriam, Aaron, Moses

are somewhere else, marching

You learn to live without prophets

without legends

to live just where you are

your burning bush, your seven-branched candlestick

the ocotillo in bloom

11.

What’s sacred is nameless

moves in the eyeflash

holds still in the circle

of the great arid basin

once watered and fertile

probes outward through twigbark

a green ghost inhabiting

dormant stick, abstract thorn

What’s sacred is singular:

out of this dry fork, this

wreck of perspective

what’s sacred tries itself

one more time

1987-1988

DELTA

If you have taken this rubble for my past

raking through it for fragments you could sell

know that I long ago moved on

deeper into the heart of the matter

If you think you can grasp me, think again:

my story flows in more than one direction

a delta springing from the riverbed

with its five fingers spread

1987

6 / 21

It’s June and summer’s height

the longest bridge of light

leaps from all the rivets

of the sky

Yet it’s of earth

and nowhere else I have to speak

Only on earth has this light taken on

these swivelled meanings, only on this earth

where we are dying befouled, gritting our teeth

losing our guiding stars

has this light

found an alphabet     a mouth

1987

FOR AN ALBUM

Our story isn’t a file of photographs

faces laughing under green leaves

or snowlit doorways, on the verge of driving

away, our story is not about women

victoriously perched on the one

sunny day of the conference,

nor lovers displaying love:

Our story is of moments

when even slow motion moved too fast

for the shutter of the camera:

words that blew our lives apart, like so,

eyes that cut and caught each other,

mime of the operating room

where gas and knives quote each other

moments before the telephone

starts ringing: our story is

how still we stood,

how fast.

1987

DREAMWOOD

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand

there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see

or the child’s older self,

a woman dreaming when she should be typing

the last report of the day.      If this were a map,

she thinks, a map laid down to memorize

because she might be walking it, it shows

ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert,

here and there a sign of aquifers

and one possible watering-hole.     If this were a map

it would be the map of the last age of her life,

not a map of choices but a map of variations

on the one great choice. It would be the map by which

she could see the end of touristic choices,

of distances blued and purpled by romance,

by which she would recognize that poetry

isn’t revolution but a way of knowing

why it must come.     If this cheap, massproduced

wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,

massproduced yet durable, being here now,

is what it is yet a dream-map

so obdurate, so plain,

she thinks, the material and the dream can join

and that is the poem and that is the late report.

1987

WALKING DOWN THE ROAD

On a clear night in Live Oak you can see

the stars glittering low as from the deck

of a frigate.

In Live Oak without pavements you can walk

the fronts of old homesteads, past tattered palms,

original rosebushes, thick walnut trees

ghosts of the liveoak groves

the whitemen cleared.     On a night like this

the old California thickens and bends

the Baja streams out like lava-melt

we are no longer the United States

we’re a lost piece of Mexico

maybe dreaming the destruction

of the Indians, reading the headlines,

how the gringos marched into Mexico City

forcing California into the hand

of Manifest Destiny, law following greed.

And the pale lies trapped in the flickering boxes

here in Live Oak tonight, they too follow.

One thing follows on another, that is time:

Carmel in its death-infested prettiness,

thousands of skeletons stacked in the campo santo:

the spring fouled by the pickaxe:

the flag dragged on to the moon:

the crystal goblet smashed: grains of the universe

flashing their angry tears, here in Live Oak.

1988

THE SLIDES

Three dozen squares of light-inflicted glass

lie in a quarter-century’s dust

under the skylight. I can show you this:

also a sprung couch spewing

dessicated mouse-havens, a revolving bookstand

rusted on its pivot, leaning

with books of an era: Roosevelt vs Recovery

The Mystery & Lure of Perfume     My Brother Was Mozart

I’ve had this attic in mind for years

Now you

who keep a lookout for

places like this, make your living

off things like this:     You see, the books are rotting,

sunbleached, unfashionable

the furniture neglected past waste

but the lantern-slides—their story

could be sold, they could be a prize

I want to see

your face when you start to sort them. You want

cloched hats of the Thirties, engagement portraits

with marcelled hair, maillots daring the waves,

my family album:

This is the razing of the spinal cord

by the polio virus

this, the lung-tissue kissed by the tubercle bacillus

this with the hooked shape is

the cell that leaks anemia to the next generation

Enlarged on a screen

they won’t be quaint; they go on working; they still kill.

1987

HARPERS FERRY

Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads

glittering at each other’s throats, the Virginia mountains fading

across the gorge, the October-shortened sun, the wooden town,

rebellion sprouting encampments in the hills

and a white girl running away from home

who will have to see it all. But where do I get this, how

do I know how the light quails from the trembling

waters, autumn goes to ash from ridge to ridge

how behind the gunmetal pines the guns

are piled, the sun drops, and the watchfires burn?

I know the men’s faces tremble like smoky

crevices in a cave where candle-stumps have been stuck

on ledges by fugitives. The men are dark and sometimes pale

like her, their eyes pouched or blank or squinting, all by now

are queer, outside, and out of bounds and have no membership

in any brotherhood but this: where power is handed from

the ones who can get it to the ones

who have been refused. It’s a simple act,

to steal guns and hand them to the slaves. Who would have thought

it.

Running away from home is slower than her quick feet thought

and this is not the vague and lowering North, ghostland of deeper

snows

than she has ever pictured

but this is one exact and definite place,

a wooden village at the junction of two rivers

two trestle bridges hinged and splayed,

low houses crawling up the mountains.

Suppose she slashes her leg on a slashed pines tooth, ties the leg

in a kerchief

knocks on the door of a house, the first on the edge of town

has to beg water, won’t tell her family name, afraid someone will

know her family face

lies with her throbbing leg on the vined verandah where the woman

of the house

wanted her out of there, that was clear

yet with a stern and courteous patience leaned above her

with cold tea, water from the sweetest spring, mint from the same

source

later with rags wrung from a boiling kettle

and studying, staring eyes. Eyes ringed with watching. A peachtree

shedding yellowy leaves

and a houseful of men who keep off. So great a family of men, and

then this woman

who wanted her gone yet stayed by her, watched over her.

But this girl is expert in overhearing

and one word leaps off the windowpanes like the crack of dawn,

the translation of the babble of two rivers. What does this girl

with her little family quarrel, know about arsenals?

Everything she knows is wrapped up in her leg

without which she won’t get past Virginia, though she’s running

north.

Whatever gave the girl the idea you could run away

from a family quarrel? Displace yourself, when nothing else

would change? It wasn’t books:

it was half-overheard, a wisp of talk:

escape    flight     free soil

softing past her shoulder

She has never dreamed of arsenals, though

she’s a good rifle-shot, taken at ten

by her brothers, hunting

and though they’ve climbed her over and over

leaving their wet clots in her sheets

on her new-started maidenhair

she has never reached for a gun to hold them off

for guns are the language of the strong to the weak

—How many squirrels have crashed between her sights

what vertebrae cracked at her finger’s signal

what wings staggered through the boughs

whose eyes, ringed and treed, has she eyed as prey?

There is a strategy of mass flight

a strategy of arming

questions of how, of when, of where:

the arguments soak through the walls

of the houseful of men where running from home

the white girl lies in her trouble.

There are things overheard and things unworded, never sung

or pictured, things that happen silently

as the peachtree’s galactic blossoms open in mist, the frost-star

hangs in the stubble, the decanter of moonlight pours its mournless

liquid down

steadily on the solstice fields

the cotton swells in its boll and you feel yourself engorged,

unnameable

you yourself feel encased and picked-open, you feel yourself

unenvisaged

There is no quarrel possible in this silence

You stop yourself listening for a word that will not be spoken:

listening instead to the overheard

fragments, phrases melting on air: No more    Many thousand go

And you know they are leaving as fast as they can, you whose child’s

eye followed each face wondering

not how could they leave but when: you knew they would leave

and so could you but not with them, you were not their child, they

had their own children

you could leave the house where you were daughter, sister,

prey picked open and left to silence, you could leave alone

This would be my scenario of course: that the white girl understands

what I understand and more, that the leg torn in flight

had not betrayed her, had brought her to another point of struggle

that when she takes her place she is clear in mind and her anger

true with the training of her hand and eye, her leg cured on the

porch of history

ready for more than solitary defiance. That when the General passes

through

in her blazing headrag, this girl knows her for Moses, pleads to

stand with the others in the shortened light

accepts the scrutiny, the steel-black gaze; but Moses passes and is

gone to her business elsewhere

leaving the men to theirs, the girl to her own.

But who would she take as leader?

would she fade into the woods

will she die in an indefensible position, a miscarried raid

does she lose the family face at last

pressed into a gully above two rivers, does Shenandoah or Potomac

carry her

north or south, will she wake in the mining camps to stoke the

stoves

and sleep at night with her rifle blue and loyal under her hand

does she ever forget how they left, how they taught her leaving?

1988

ONE LIFE

A woman walking in a walker on the cliffs

recalls great bodily joys, much pain.

Nothing in her is apt to say

My heart aches, though she read those words

in a battered college text, this morning

as the sun rose. It is all too

mixed, the heart too mixed with laughter

raucousing the grief, her life

too mixed, she shakes her heavy

silvered hair at all the fixed

declarations of baggage. I should be dead and I’m alive

don’t ask me how; I don’t eat like I should

and still I like how the drop of vodka

hits the tongue. I was a worker and a mother,

that means a worker and a worker

but for one you don’t pay union dues

or get a pension; for the other

the men ran the union, we ran the home.

It was terrible and good, we had more than half a life,

I had four lives at least, one out of marriage

when I kicked up all the dust I could

before I knew what I was doing.

One life with the girls on the line during the war,

yes, painting our legs and jitterbugging together

one life with a husband, not the worst,

one with your children, none of it just what you’d thought.

None of it what it could have been, if we’d known.

We took what we could.

But even this is a life, I’m reading a lot of books

I never read, my daughter brought home from school,

plays where you can almost hear them talking,

Romantic poets, Isaac Babel. A lot of lives

worse and better than what I knew. I’m walking again.

My heart doesn’t ache; sometimes though it rages.

1988

DIVISIONS OF LABOR

The revolutions wheel, compromise, utter their statements:

a new magazine appears, mastheaded with old names,

an old magazine polishes up its act

with deconstructions of the prose of Malcolm X

The women in the back rows of politics

are still licking thread to slip into the needle’s

eye, trading bones for plastic, splitting pods

for necklaces to sell to the cruise-ships

producing immaculate First Communion dresses

with flatiron and irresolute hot water

still fitting the microscopic golden wires

into the silicon chips

still teaching, watching the children

quenched in the crossfire alleys, the flashflood gullies

the kerosene flashfires

—the women whose labor remakes the world

each and every morning

I have seen a woman sitting

between the stove and the stars

her fingers singed from snuffing out the candles

of pure theory     Finger and thumb: both scorched:

I have felt that sacred wax blister my hand

1988

LIVING MEMORY

Open the book of tales you knew by heart,

begin driving the old roads again,

repeating the old sentences, which have changed

minutely from the wordings you remembered.

A full moon on the first of May

drags silver film on the Winooski River.

The villages are shut

for the night, the woods are open

and soon you arrive at a crossroads

where late, late in time you recognize

part of yourself is buried.    Call it Danville,

village of water-witches.

From here on instinct is uncompromised and clear:

the tales come crowding like the Kalevala

longing to burst from the tongue.     Under the trees

of the backroad you rumor the dark

with houses, sheds, the long barn

moored like a barge on the hillside.

Chapter and verse.     A mailbox.     A dooryard.

A drink of springwater from the kitchen tap.

An old bed, old wallpaper.    Falling asleep like a child

in the heart of the story.

Reopen the book.    A light mist soaks the page,

blunt naked buds tip the wild lilac scribbled

at the margin of the road, no one knows when.

Broken stones of drywall mark the onset

of familiar paragraphs slanting up and away

each with its own version, nothing ever

has looked the same from anywhere.

We came like others to a country of farmers—

Puritans, Catholics, Scotch Irish, Québecois:

bought a failed Yankee’s empty house and barn

from a prospering Yankee,

Jews following Yankee footprints,

prey to many myths but most of all

that Nature makes us free.     That the land can save us.

Pioneer, indigenous; we were neither.

You whose stories these farms secrete,

you whose absence these fields publish,

all you whose lifelong travail

took as given this place and weather

who did what you could with the means you had—

it was pick and shovel work

done with a pair of horses, a stone boat

a strong back, and an iron bar: clearing pasture—

Your memories crouched, foreshortened in our text.

Pages torn.     New words crowding the old.

I knew a woman whose clavicle was smashed

inside a white clapboard house with an apple tree

and a row of tulips by the door.      I had a friend

with six children and a tumor like a seventh

who drove me to my driver’s test and in exchange

wanted to see Goddard College, in Plainfield.    She’d heard

women without diplomas could study there.

I knew a woman who walked

straight across cut stubble in her bare feet away,

women who said, He’s a good man, never

laid a hand to me as living proof.

A man they said fought death

to keep fire for his wife for one more winter, leave

a woodpile to outlast him.

I was left the legacy of a pile of stovewood

split by a man in the mute chains of rage.

The land he loved as landscape

could not unchain him.     There are many,

Gentile and Jew, it has not saved.     Many hearts have burst

over these rocks, in the shacks

on the failure sides of these hills.     Many guns

turned on brains already splitting

in silence.     Where are those versions?

Written-across like nineteenth-century letters

or secrets penned in vinegar, invisible

till the page is held over flame.

I was left the legacy of three sons

—as if in an old legend of three brothers

where one changes into a rufous hawk

one into a snowy owl

one into a whistling swan

and each flies to the mother’s side

as she travels, bringing something she has lost,

and she sees their eyes are the eyes of her children

and speaks their names and they become her sons.

But there is no one legend and one legend only.

This month the land still leafless, out from snow

opens in all directions, the transparent woods

with sugar-house, pond, cellar-hole unscreened.

Winter and summer cover the closed roads

but for a few weeks they lie exposed,

the old nervous-system of the land.     It’s the time

when history speaks in a row of crazy fence-poles

a blackened chimney, houseless, a spring

soon to be choked in second growth

a stack of rusting buckets, a rotting sledge.

It’s the time when your own living

laid open between seasons

ponders clues like the One Way sign defaced

to Bone Way, the stones

of a graveyard in Vermont, a Jewish cemetery

in Birmingham, Alabama.

How you have needed these places,

as a tall gaunt woman used to need to sit

at the knees of bronze-hooded Grief

by Clover Adams’ grave.

But you will end somewhere else, a sift of ashes

awkwardly flung by hands you have held and loved

or, nothing so individual, bones reduced

with, among, other bones, anonymous,

or wherever the Jewish dead

have to be sought in the wild grass overwhelming

the cracked stones.     Hebrew spelled in wilderness.

All we can read is life.     Death is invisible.

A yahrzeit candle belongs

to life.     The sugar skulls

eaten on graves for the Day of the Dead

belong to life.     To the living.     The Kaddish is to the living,

the Day of the Dead, for the living.     Only the living

invent these plumes, tombs, mounds, funeral ships,

living hands turn the mirrors to the walls,

tear the boughs of yew to lay on the casket,

rip the clothes of mourning.     Only the living

decide death’s color: is it white or black?

The granite bulkhead

incised with names, the quilt of names, were made

by the living, for the living.

I have watched

films from a Pathé camera, a picnic

in sepia, I have seen my mother

tossing an acorn into the air;

my grandfather, alone in the heart of his family;

my father, young, dark, theatrical;

myself, a six-month child.

Watching the dead we see them living

their moments, they were at play, nobody thought

they would be watched so.

When Selma threw

her husband’s ashes into the Hudson

and they blew back on her and on us, her friends,

it was life.     Our blood raced in that gritty wind.

Such details get bunched, packed, stored

in these cellar-holes of memory

so little is needed

to call on the power, though you can’t name its name:

It has its ways of coming back:

a truck going into gear on the crown of the road

the white-throat sparrow’s notes

the moon in her fullness standing

right over the concrete steps the way

she stood the night they landed there.

From here

nothing has changed, and everything.

The scratched and treasured photograph Richard showed me

taken in ’29, the year I was born:

it’s the same road I saw

strewn with the Perseids one August night,

looking older, steeper than now

and rougher, yet I knew it.     Time’s

power, the only just power—would you

give it away?

1988

TURNING

1.

Deadstillness over droughtlands.

Parched, the heart of the matter.

Panic among smaller animals

used to licking water from cool stones.

Over the great farms, a burning-glass

one-eyed and wild as a jack,

the corn snatched in a single afternoon

of the one-eyed jack’s impassive stare.

And in that other country

of choices made by others

that country I never chose

that country of terrible leavings and returnings

in that country whose map I carry on my palm

the forests are on fire: history is on fire.

My foot drags in the foothills of two lands;

At the turn the spirit pauses

and faces the high passes:

bloodred granite, sandstone steeped in blood.

At the turn the spirit turns,

looks back—if any follow—

squints ahead—if any lead—

What would you bring along on a trek like this?

What is bringing you along?

2.

In a time of broken hands

in a broken-promised land

something happens to the right hand

Remembering a city, it forgets

flexion, gestures that danced like flames

the lifeline buried in the fist

forgets the pedlar’s trinket, fine to finger and lay forth,

the scalpel’s path, the tracing of the pulse

the sprinkle of salt and rip of chicken feathers

forgets the wrist’s light swivel breaking bread

the matzoh crumb

fingered to secret lips in stinking fog

forgets its own ache, lying

work-stiffened, mute

on the day most like Paradise

Becomes the handle of a club

an enemy of hands

emptied of all memories but one

When the right hand forgets its cunning, what of the other?

Shall we invent its story?

Has it simply lain in trance

disowned, written-off, unemployed?

Does it twitch now, finger and thumb,

does the prickle of memory race through?

When the right hand becomes the enemy of hands

what does the left hand make of their old collaboration?

Pick up the book, the pinch of salt, the matzoh crumb,

hand, and begin to teach.

3.

Finally, we will make change. This eyeflash,

this touch, handing the drenched flyers,

these glances back at history—

riverside where harps hang from the trees,

cracked riverbed with grounded hulks,

unhealed water to cross—

leaving superstition behind—

first our own, then others’—

that barrier, that stream

where swimming against the current will become

no metaphor: this is how you land, unpurified,

winded, shivering, on the further shore

where there are only new kinds of tasks, and old:

writing with others that open letter or brief

that might—if only—we know it happens:

no sudden revelation but the slow

turn of consciousness, while every day

climbs on the back of the days before:

no new day, only a list of days,

no task you expect to see finished, but

you can’t hold back from the task.

4

A public meeting.     I glance at a woman’s face:

strong lines and soft, listening, a little on guard:

we have come separately, are sitting apart,

know each other in the room, have slept twelve years

in the same bed, attend now to the speaker.

Her subject is occupation, a promised land,

displacement, deracination, two peoples called Semites,

humiliation, force, women trying to speak with women,

the subject is how to break a mold of discourse,

how little by little minds change

but that they do change.     We two have fought

our own battles side by side, at dawn, over supper,

our changes of mind have come

with the stir of hairs, the sound of a cracked phrase:

we have depended on something.

What then?     Sex isn’t enough, merely to trust

each other’s inarticulate sounds,

—what then?      call it mutual recognition.

5

Whatever you are that has tracked us this far,

I never thought you were on our side,

I only thought you did not judge us.

Yet as a cell might hallucinate

the eye—intent, impassioned—

behind the lens of the microscope

so I have thought of you,

whatever you are—a mindfulness—

whatever you are: the place beyond all places,

beyond boundaries, green lines,

wire-netted walls

the place beyond documents.

Unnameable by choice.

So why am I out here, trying

to read your name in the illegible air?

—vowel washed from a stone,

solitude of no absence,

forbidden face-to-face

—trying to hang these wraiths

of syllables, breath

without echo, why?

1988

NOTES

“Sleepwalking     Next to Death”: Title and opening words from “Slaap-wandelen (naast de dood)” by Chr. J. van Geel, Dutch poet and painter. For the original and my translation, see Adrienne Rich, Necessities of Life (New York: Norton, 1966).

“Letters in the Family, II: Yugoslavia, 1944”: See Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary (New York: Schocken, 1973). Born in Budapest, 1921, Hannah Senesh became a Zionist and emigrated to Palestine at the age of eighteen; her mother and brother remained in Europe. In 1943, she joined an expedition of Jews who trained under the British to parachute behind Nazi lines in Europe and connect with the partisan underground, to rescue Jews in Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. She was arrested by the Nazis, imprisoned, tortured, and executed in November 1944. Like the other letter-writers, “Esther” is an imagined person.

See also Ruth Whitman’s long poem, The Testing of Hannah Senesh (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986).

“The Desert as Garden of Paradise,” section 2: Chavela Vargas, a Mexican popular and traditional singer.

Section 3: Malintzin/La Malinche/Marina are names for an Aztec woman given as a slave to Hernán Cortés on his arrival in Mexico in 1519. Her historical reality has undergone many layerings of legend and symbolism; more recently she has become a frequent presence in Chicana feminist literature. See, for example, Norma Alarcón, “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Revision through Malintzin,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone, 1981; distributed by Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, P.O. Box 908, Latham, NY 12110). See also Lucha Corpi’s “Marina” poems, and the author’s note, in Fireflight: Three Latin American Poets, trans. Catherine Rodriguez-Nieto (Oakland, Calif.: Oyez Books, 1975); and Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

Section 7: See Peter Masten Dunne, S.J., Black Robes in Lower California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); Antonine Tibeson, O.F.M., ed., The Writings of Junípero Serra, I (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1955); Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of California Indians (Santa Barbara and Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1974); Van H. Garner, The Broken Ring: The Destruction of the California Indians (Tucson, Ariz.: Westernlore Press, 1982).

Sections 10, 11: Italicized phrases from John C. van Dyke, The Desert (1901) (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1980).

“The Slides”: Thanks to Janis Kelly for her keen eye on the medical details.

“Harpers Ferry”: In 1859, the white abolitionist John Brown rented a farm near Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), as a base for slave insurrections. On October 16 of that year, he and his men raided and captured the federal arsenal, but found their escape blocked by local militia; the U.S. Marines then seized the arsenal. Ten of Brown’s men were killed in this conflict, and Brown himself was later tried and hanged.

Harriet Tubman (1820–1913), Black antislavery activist and strategist, led more than 300 people from slavery to freedom via the Underground Railroad. She was known as “General Moses.” Though in contact with John Brown, she withdrew from participation before the raid. Tubman never actually came to Harpers Ferry; her appearance in this poem is a fiction.

“Living Memory”: “it was pick and shovel work . . . ,” quoted from Wally Hunt’s Vermont (Brownington, Vt.: Orleans County Historical Society, 1983).

ADRIENNE RICH (1929-2012) was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. The author of more than thirty books, she brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. She was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the National Book Award, the Bollinger Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Also by Adrienne Rich

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010

A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 1997–2008

Poetry & Commitment: An Essay

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2000

Fox: Poems 1998–2000

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

Collected Early Poems 1950–1970

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988

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

Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems

Sources

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

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

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977

Twenty-one Love Poems

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972

The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970

Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968

Necessities of Life

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

The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems

A Change of World

Thanks to the following magazines in which some of these poems first appeared: American Poetry Review; Field; Jewish Currents; Lilith; Poetry (Seventy-fifth Anniversary issue); Sequoia; Sinister Wisdom; Tri-Quarterly, a publication of Northwestern University; The Woman’s Review of Books; Yale Review.

Copyright © 1989 by Adrienne Rich

All rights reserved.

Book design by Antonina Krass.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

Time’s power: poems 1985–1988 / Adrienne Rich.—1st ed.

p.    cm.

I.    Title.

PS3535.I233T5      1989

811'.54—dc19

88-29059

ISBN 0-393-02677-9

ISBN 0-393-30575-9 PBK.

ISBN 978-0-393-30575-3

ISBN 978-0-393-34813-2 (e-book)

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

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

www.wwnorton.com

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Contents

Solfeggietto

This

Love Poem

Negotiations

In a Classroom

The Novel

A Story

In Memoriam: D.K.

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

Sleepwalking Next to Death

Letters in the Family

The Desert as Garden of Paradise

Delta

6/21

For an Album

Dreamwood

Walking Down the Road

The Slides

Harpers Ferry

One Life

Divisions of Labor

Living Memory

Turning

Notes

About the Author

Also by Adrienne Rich

Copyright