ADRIENNE RICH

The Fact of a

Doorframe

Selected Poems 1950–2001

for my teachers—present and gone

Contents

Foreword

From A Change of World (1951)

Storm Warnings

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

Boundary

At a Bach Concert

From The Diamond Cutters (1955)

Ideal Landscape

Living in Sin

The Snow Queen

Letter from the Land of Sinners

From Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

The Knight

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Antinoüs: The Diaries

Peeling Onions

The Roofwalker

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

From Necessities of Life (1966)

Necessities of Life

In the Woods

The Trees

Like This Together

Night-Pieces: For a Child

“I Am in Danger—Sir—”

Mourning Picture

The Knot

Focus

From Leaflets (1969)

Orion

In the Evening

The Demon Lover

Jerusalem

Night Watch

For a Russian Poet

Abnegation

Implosions

On Edges

Leaflets

from Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib

7/12/68

The clouds are electric in this university.

7/14/68: i

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

7/14/68: ii

Did you think I was talking about my life?

7/16/68: i

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

7/16/68: ii

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

7/26/68: i

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

8/1/68

The order of the small town on the riverbank,

8/4/68

If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

8/8/68: i

From here on, all of us will be living

8/8/68: ii

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

From The Will to Change (1971)

November 1968

Study of History

Planetarium

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

Letters: March 1969

The Stelae

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

from Shooting Script

From Diving into the Wreck (1973)

Trying to Talk with a Man

When We Dead Awaken

From the Prison House

The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One

Dialogue

Diving into the Wreck

Song

The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message

Rape

Burning Oneself In

From a Survivor

August

Uncollected Poems (1950–1974)

The Prisoners

At the Jewish New Year

Dien Bien Phu

Re-forming the Crystal

White Night

From an Old House in America

The Fact of a Doorframe

From The Dream of a Common Language (1978)

Power

Hunger

Cartographies of Silence

Twenty-One Love Poems

A Woman Dead in Her Forties

Natural Resources

From A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981)

Integrity

For Memory

For Ethel Rosenberg

Grandmothers

The Spirit of Place

Frame

From Your Native Land, Your Life (1986)

For the Record

Virginia 1906

For an Occupant

North American Time

Blue Rock

from Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1.

Look:  this is January

2.

Heart of cold.

3.

My mouth hovers

6.

Dear Adrienne: I’m calling you up tonight

7.

Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain

10.

Night  over the great and the little worlds

11.

I came out of the hospital

12.

Violence as purification

14.

Lately in my dreams

15.

You who think I find words for everything

18.

The problem, unstated till now

20.

The tobacco fields lie fallow

22.

In a bald skull sits our friend

23.

You know the Government must have pushed them

26.

You: air-driven reft

27.

The Tolstoyans

29.

You who think I find words for everything

From Time’s Power (1989)

In a Classroom

The Novel

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest

The Desert as Garden of Paradise

Delta

Dreamwood

Harpers Ferry

From An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)

from An Atlas of the Difficult World

I

A dark woman, head bent

II

Here is a map of our country

IV

Late summers, early autumns

V

Catch if you can your country’s moment

VII

(The dream-site)

VIII

He thought there would be a limit

IX

On this earth, in this life

X

Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness

XI

One night on Monterey Bay

XIII

(Dedications)

That Mouth

Marghanita

Tattered Kaddish

Final Notations

From Dark Fields of the Republic (1995)

What Kind of Times Are These

In Those Years

Calle Visión

Then or Now

Food Packages: 1947

Innocence: 1945

Sunset, December, 1993

Deportations

And Now

Late Ghazal

from Inscriptions

One:

comrade

Two:

movement

Four:

history

Six:

edgelit

From Midnight Salvage (1999)

For an Anniversary

Midnight Salvage

Char

Letters to a Young Poet

Camino Real

Seven Skins

Rusted Legacy

From Fox (2001)

Veterans Day

Architect

Fox

Fire

Noctilucent Clouds

If Your Name Is on the List

1999

Four Short Poems

1 (driving home from Robin Blaser’s reading)

2 We’re not yet out of the everglades

3 Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played

4 From the new crudities, from the old

Ends of the Earth

Notes

Index

Foreword

A poem may be written in the moment but it does its work in time. May be written in acute emotion yet drives toward precision, compression, the existential intentionality of art which is its way of discovering meaning. Made in and from the material of language, poetry is continually wrestling with its own medium.

The language of any poem is the language of a society and the poet’s relation to that society is implicit—or naked—in the poem: in image and metaphor, in traditions invoked or contended against, urgency or relaxation of the breath, musics listened to, echoes of conversations overheard, the entire complex of choices made, along with the subterranean dimension in all art.

These are some of the things you learn, as a poet, through practise and experience—working on your own poems, reading and pondering other poems and poetries, plunging your hands deep into the social language into which you were born, and other social languages you go on to experience.

In the title poem of this collection, written in 1974 (when earthquakes were still merely metaphorical to me) I spoke of poetry as “hewn from the commonest living substance” as a doorframe is hewn of wood. Later, I would define “the true nature of poetry” as “the drive to connect. / The dream of a common language.” As time went on, I was to realize that “common” in the sense of collectively owned, is only relative where language is concerned. My given language was Anglo-American, threaded as it is with Africanisms, Creolisms, Spanish, Native American languages, each intimating a world and a history of its own.

Language as material force—this is something the student poet of A Change of World had not yet thought about, and twenty years later was impelled to reflect on in “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” “I grasp for you,” says the poet in “The Fact of a Doorframe,” speaking to poetry itself, as language. “This is the oppressor’s language,” she wrote in “The Burning of Paper,” “yet I need it to talk to you.” A typewriter in flames is the metaphor here. To work in a medium which can be, has been, used as an instrument of trivialization and deceit, not to mention colonization and humiliation, is somewhat different from working in a medium like stone, clay, paint, charcoal, even iron or steel. A poet cannot refuse language, choose another medium. But the poet can re-fuse the language given to him or her, bend and torque it into an instrument for connection instead of dominance and apartheid: toward what Edouard Glissant has wonderfully called “the poetics of relation.” The anarchist poet Paul Goodman wrote of “the gaunt and fumbling style of acting out of desperation.” Poetry has need for this style, as well as for the luminosity of the lyrical phrase, the Whitmanic or Biblical measure of the ocean, impetuosity and wit, the dialogic phrasing of jazz, moments of delicacy on the edges of silence—and much else. What poetry does not need is conformity and complacency.

My life has been enmeshed so long with poetry that I cannot, looking back at this collection of five decades, imagine how I would have survived without this doorframe, this work. But it was first the poetry of others, in English—Blake, Keats, Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, the King James version of the Bible—listened to and read in childhood, that let me know the doorframe was there for me, that such a possibility existed. And there were the rhythms of everyday sayings and rhymes and narration, songs sung at the living-room piano, my parents’ Southern tonalities, African American talk, speeches on the radio during World War II. You can absorb all this and still not know what, literally, to make of it. Whatever I have come to make of it I owe to these early, certainly privileged beginnings and to my later awakening to the power and responsibilities of the art—through the poems of my contemporaries, through friends, teachers, lovers, and students, through political movements, and of course through mistakes and accidental turnings.

I want to thank my editor, Jill Bialosky, my literary agent, Frances Goldin, my lecture agent, Steven Barclay, all of whom, with their colleagues, have given my work extraordinary and skillful support.

Adrienne Rich

March 2002

From

A Change of World

1951

Storm Warnings

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,

And knowing better than the instrument

What winds are walking overhead, what zone

Of gray unrest is moving across the land,

I leave the book upon a pillowed chair

And walk from window to closed window, watching

Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air

Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,

How with a single purpose time has traveled

By secret currents of the undiscerned

Into this polar realm. Weather abroad

And weather in the heart alike come on

Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change

Lies all the mastery of elements

Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.

Time in the hand is not control of time,

Nor shattered fragments of an instrument

A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,

We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black

And set a match to candles sheathed in glass

Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine

Of weather through the unsealed aperture.

This is our sole defense against the season;

These are the things that we have learned to do

Who live in troubled regions.

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

They do not fear the men beneath the tree;

They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.

The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band

Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Boundary

What has happened here will do

To bite the living world in two,

Half for me and half for you.

Here at last I fix a line

Severing the world’s design

Too small to hold both yours and mine.

There’s enormity in a hair

Enough to lead men not to share

Narrow confines of a sphere

But put an ocean or a fence

Between two opposite intents.

A hair would span the difference.

At a Bach Concert

Coming by evening through the wintry city

We said that art is out of love with life.

Here we approach a love that is not pity.

This antique discipline, tenderly severe,

Renews belief in love yet masters feeling,

Asking of us a grace in what we bear.

Form is the ultimate gift that love can offer—

The vital union of necessity

With all that we desire, all that we suffer.

A too-compassionate art is half an art.

Only such proud restraining purity

Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart.

From

The Diamond Cutters

1955

Ideal Landscape

We had to take the world as it was given:

The nursemaid sitting passive in the park

Was rarely by a changeling prince accosted.

The mornings happened similar and stark

In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay

Watching today unfold like yesterday.

Our friends were not unearthly beautiful,

Nor spoke with tongues of gold; our lovers blundered

Now and again when most we sought perfection,

Or hid in cupboards when the heavens thundered.

The human rose to haunt us everywhere,

Raw, flawed, and asking more than we could bear.

And always time was rushing like a tram

Through streets of a foreign city, streets we saw

Opening into great and sunny squares

We could not find again, no map could show—

Never those fountains tossed in that same light,

Those gilded trees, those statues green and white.

Living in Sin

She had thought the studio would keep itself;

no dust upon the furniture of love.

Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,

the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,

a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat

stalking the picturesque amusing mouse

had risen at his urging.

Not that at five each separate stair would writhe

under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light

so coldly would delineate the scraps

of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles;

that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers

a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own—

envoy from some village in the moldings . . .

Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,

sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,

declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,

rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;

while she, jeered by the minor demons,

pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found

a towel to dust the table-top,

and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.

By evening she was back in love again,

though not so wholly but throughout the night

she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming

like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

The Snow Queen

Child with a chip of mirror in his eye

Saw the world ugly, fled to plains of ice

Where beauty was the Snow Queen’s promises.

Under my lids a splinter sharp as his

Has made me wish you lying dead

Whose image digs the needle deeper still.

In the deceptive province of my birth

I had seen yes turn no, the saints descend,

Their sacred faces twisted into smiles,

The stars gone lechering, the village spring

Gush mud and toads—all miracles

Befitting an incalculable age.

To love a human face was to discover

The cracks of paint and varnish on the brow;

Soon to distrust all impulses of flesh

That strews its sawdust on the chamber floor,

While at the window peer two crones

Who once were Juliet and Jessica.

No matter, since I kept a little while

One thing intact from that perversity—

Though landscapes bloomed in monstrous cubes and coils.

In you belonged simplicities of light

To mend distraction, teach the air

To shine, the stars to find their way again.

Yet here the Snow Queen’s cold prodigious will

Commands me, and your face has lost its power,

Dissolving to its opposite like the rest.

Under my ribs a diamond splinter now

Sticks, and has taken root; I know

Only this frozen spear that drives me through.

Letter from the Land of Sinners

I write you this out of another province

That you may never see:

Country of rivers, its topography

Mutable in detail, yet always one,

Blasted in certain places, here by glaciers,

There by the work of man.

The fishers by the water have no boast

Save of their freedom; here

A man may cast a dozen kinds of lure

And think his days rewarded if he sight

Now and again the prize, unnetted, flicking

Its prism-gleams of light.

The old lord lived secluded in his park

Until the hall was burned

Years ago, by his tenants; both have learned

Better since then, and now our children run

To greet him. Quail and hunter have forgotten

The echo of the gun.

I said there are blasted places: we have kept

Their nakedness intact—

No marble to commemorate an act

Superhuman or merely rash; we know

Why they are there and why the seed that falls there

Is certain not to grow.

We keep these places as we keep the time

Scarred on our recollection

When some we loved broke from us in defection,

Or we ourselves harried to death too soon

What we could least forgo. Our memories

Recur like the old moon.

But we have made another kind of peace,

And walk where boughs are green,

Forgiven by the selves that we have been,

And learning to forgive. Our apples taste

Sweeter this year; our gates are falling down,

And need not be replaced.

From

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

1963

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

(The World Book, 1928)

“Organized knowledge in story and picture”

confronts through dusty glass

an eye grown dubious.

I can recall when knowledge still was pure,

not contradictory, pleasurable

as cutting out a paper doll.

You opened up a book and there it was:

everything just as promised, from

Kurdistan to Mormons, Gum

Arabic to Kumquat, neither more nor less.

Facts could be kept separate

by a convention; that was what

made childhood possible. Now knowledge finds me out;

in all its risible untidiness

it traces me to each address,

dragging in things I never thought about.

I don’t invite what facts can be

held at arm’s length; a family

of jeering irresponsibles always

comes along gypsy-style

and there you have them all

forever on your hands. It never pays.

If I could still extrapolate

the morning-glory on the gate

from Petersburg in history—but it’s too late.

1954

The Knight

A knight rides into the noon,

and his helmet points to the sun,

and a thousand splintered suns

are the gaiety of his mail.

The soles of his feet glitter

and his palms flash in reply,

and under his crackling banner

he rides like a ship in sail.

A knight rides into the noon,

and only his eye is living,

a lump of bitter jelly

set in a metal mask,

betraying rags and tatters

that cling to the flesh beneath

and wear his nerves to ribbons

under the radiant casque.

Who will unhorse this rider

and free him from between

the walls of iron, the emblems

crushing his chest with their weight?

Will they defeat him gently,

or leave him hurled on the green,

his rags and wounds still hidden

under the great breastplate?

1957

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

1.

You, once a belle in Shreveport,

with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,

still have your dresses copied from that time,

and play a Chopin prelude

called by Cortot: “Delicious recollections

float like perfume through the memory.”

Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,

heavy with useless experience, rich

with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,

crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge

of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter

wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

2.

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

she hears the angels chiding, and looks out

past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.

Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.

Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.

Sometimes she’s let the tapstream scald her arm,

a match burn to her thumbnail,

or held her hand above the kettle’s snout

right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,

since nothing hurts her anymore, except

each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes.

3.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,

that sprung-lidded, still commodious

steamer-trunk of tempora and mores

gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,

the female pills, the terrible breasts

of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.

Two handsome women, gripped in argument,

each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream

across the cut glass and majolica

like Furies cornered from their prey:

The argument ad feminam, all the old knives

that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,

ma semblable, ma soeur!

4.

Knowing themselves too well in one another:

their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,

the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .

Reading while waiting

for the iron to heat,

writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—

in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,

or, more often,

iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,

dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

5.

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

she shaves her legs until they gleam

like petrified mammoth-tusk.

6.

When to her lute Corinna sings

neither words nor music are her own;

only the long hair dipping

over her cheek, only the song

of silk against her knees

and these

adjusted in reflections of an eye.

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before

an unlocked door, that cage of cages,

tell us, you bird, you tragical machine—

is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned down

by love, for you the only natural action,

are you edged more keen

to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown

her household books to you, daughter-in-law,

that her sons never saw?

7.

“To have in this uncertain world some stay

which cannot be undermined, is

of the utmost consequence.”

Thus wrote

a woman, partly brave and partly good,

who fought with what she partly understood.

Few men about her would or could do more,

hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore.

8.

“You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

and turn part legend, part convention.

Still, eyes inaccurately dream

behind closed windows blankening with steam.

Deliciously, all that we might have been,

all that we were—fire, tears,

wit, taste, martyred ambition—

stirs like the memory of refused adultery

the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

9.

Not that it is done well, but

that it is done at all? Yes, think

of the odds! or shrug them off forever.

This luxury of the precocious child,

Time’s precious chronic invalid,—

would we, darlings, resign it if we could?

Our blight has been our sinecure:

mere talent was enough for us—

glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

Sigh no more, ladies.

Time is male

and in his cups drinks to the fair.

Bemused by gallantry, we hear

our mediocrities over-praised,

indolence read as abnegation,

slattern thought styled intuition,

every lapse forgiven, our crime

only to cast too bold a shadow

or smash the mold straight off.

For that, solitary confinement,

tear gas, attrition shelling.

Few applicants for that honor.

10.

Well,

she’s long about her coming, who must be

more merciless to herself than history.

Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge

breasted and glancing through the currents,

taking the light upon her

at least as beautiful as any boy

or helicopter,

poised, still coming,

her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:

delivered

palpable

ours.

1958–1960

Antinoüs: The Diaries

Autumn torture. The old signs

smeared on the pavement, sopping leaves

rubbed into the landscape as unguent on a bruise,

brought indoors, even, as they bring flowers, enormous,

with the colors of the body’s secret parts.

All this. And then, evenings, needing to be out,

walking fast, fighting the fire

that must die, light that sets my teeth on edge with joy,

till on the black embankment

I’m a cart stopped in the ruts of time.

Then at some house the rumor of truth and beauty

saturates a room like lilac-water

in the steam of a bath, fires snap, heads are high,

gold hair at napes of necks, gold in glasses,

gold in the throat, poetry of furs and manners.

Why do I shiver then? Haven’t I seen,

over and over, before the end of an evening,

the three opened coffins carried in and left in a corner?

Haven’t I watched as somebody cracked his shin

on one of them, winced and hopped and limped

laughing to lay his hand on a beautiful arm

striated with hairs of gold, like an almond-shell?

The old, needless story. For if I’m here

it is by choice and when at last

I smell my own rising nausea, feel the air

tighten around my stomach like a surgical bandage,

I can’t pretend surprise. What is it I so miscarry?

If what I spew on the tiles at last,

helpless, disgraced, alone,

is in part what I’ve swallowed from glasses, eyes,

motions of hands, opening and closing mouths,

isn’t it also dead gobbets of myself,

abortive, murdered, or never willed?

1959

Peeling Onions

Only to have a grief

equal to all these tears!

There’s not a sob in my chest.

Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt

I pare away, no hero,

merely a cook.

Crying was labor, once

when I’d good cause.

Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds

raw in my head,

so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.

A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain—

yet all that stayed

stuffed in my lungs like smog.

These old tears in the chopping-bowl.

1961

The Roofwalker

—for Denise Levertov

Over the half-finished houses

night comes. The builders

stand on the roof. It is

quiet after the hammers,

the pulleys hang slack.

Giants, the roofwalkers,

on a listing deck, the wave

of darkness about to break

on their heads. The sky

is a torn sail where figures

pass magnified, shadows

on a burning deck.

I feel like them up there:

exposed, larger than life,

and due to break my neck.

Was it worth while to lay—

with infinite exertion—

a roof I can’t live under?

—All those blueprints,

closings of gaps,

measurings, calculations?

A life I didn’t choose

chose me: even

my tools are the wrong ones

for what I have to do.

I’m naked, ignorant,

a naked man fleeing

across the roofs

who could with a shade of difference

be sitting in the lamplight

against the cream wallpaper

reading—not with indifference—

about a naked man

fleeing across the roofs.

1961

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Either you will

go through this door

or you will not go through.

If you go through

there is always the risk

of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly

and you must look back

and let them happen.

If you do not go through

it is possible

to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes

to hold your position

to die bravely

but much will blind you,

much will evade you,

at what cost who knows?

The door itself

makes no promises.

It is only a door.

1962

From

Necessities of Life

1966

Necessities of Life

Piece by piece I seem

to re-enter the world: I first began

a small, fixed dot, still see

that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack

pushed into the scene,

a hard little head protruding

from the pointillist’s buzz and bloom.

After a time the dot

begins to ooze. Certain heats

melt it.

Now I was hurriedly

blurring into ranges

of burnt red, burning green,

whole biographies swam up and

swallowed me like Jonah.

Jonah! I was Wittgenstein,

Mary Wollstonecraft, the soul

of Louis Jouvet, dead

in a blown-up photograph.

Till, wolfed almost to shreds,

I learned to make myself

unappetizing. Scaly as a dry bulb

thrown into a cellar

I used myself, let nothing use me.

Like being on a private dole,

sometimes more like kneading bricks in Egypt.

What life was there, was mine,

now and again to lay

one hand on a warm brick

and touch the sun’s ghost

with economical joy,

now and again to name

over the bare necessities.

So much for those days. Soon

practice may make me middling-perfect, I’ll

dare inhabit the world

trenchant in motion as an eel, solid

as a cabbage-head. I have invitations:

a curl of mist steams upward

from a field, visible as my breath,

houses along a road stand waiting

like old women knitting, breathless

to tell their tales.

1962

In the Woods

“Difficult ordinary happiness,”

no one nowadays believes in you.

I shift, full-length on the blanket,

to fix the sun precisely

behind the pine-tree’s crest

so light spreads through the needles

alive as water just

where a snake has surfaced,

unreal as water in green crystal.

Bad news is always arriving.

“We’re hiders, hiding from something bad,”

sings the little boy.

Writing these words in the woods,

I feel like a traitor to my friends,

even to my enemies.

The common lot’s to die

a stranger’s death and lie

rouged in the coffin, in a dress

chosen by the funeral director.

Perhaps that’s why we never

see clocks on public buildings any more.

A fact no architect will mention.

We’re hiders, hiding from something bad

most of the time.

Yet, and outrageously, something good

finds us, found me this morning

lying on a dusty blanket

among the burnt-out Indian pipes

and bursting-open lady’s-slippers.

My soul, my helicopter, whirred

distantly, by habit, over

the old pond with the half-drowned boat

toward which it always veers

for consolation: ego’s Arcady:

leaving the body stuck

like a leaf against a screen.—

Happiness! how many times

I’ve stranded on that word,

at the edge of that pond; seen

as if through tears, the dragon-fly—

only to find it all

going differently for once

this time: my soul wheeled back

and burst into my body.

Found! Ready or not.

If I move now, the sun

naked between the trees

will melt me as I lie.

1963

The Trees

The trees inside are moving out into the forest,

the forest that was empty all these days

where no bird could sit

no insect hide

no sun bury its feet in shadow

the forest that was empty all these nights

will be full of trees by morning.

All night the roots work

to disengage themselves from the cracks

in the veranda floor.

The leaves strain toward the glass

small twigs stiff with exertion

long-cramped boughs shuffling under the roof

like newly discharged patients

half-dazed, moving

to the clinic doors.

I sit inside, doors open to the veranda

writing long letters

in which I scarcely mention the departure

of the forest from the house.

The night is fresh, the whole moon shines

in a sky still open

the smell of leaves and lichen

still reaches like a voice into the rooms.

My head is full of whispers

which tomorrow will be silent.

Listen. The glass is breaking.

The trees are stumbling forward

into the night. Winds rush to meet them.

The moon is broken like a mirror,

its pieces flash now in the crown

of the tallest oak.

1963

Like This Together

—for A.H.C.

1.

Wind rocks the car.

We sit parked by the river,

silence between our teeth.

Birds scatter across islands

of broken ice. Another time

I’d have said: “Canada geese,”

knowing you love them.

A year, ten years from now

I’ll remember this—

this sitting like drugged birds

in a glass case—

not why, only that we

were here like this together.

2.

They’re tearing down, tearing up

this city, block by block.

Rooms cut in half

hang like flayed carcasses,

their old roses in rags,

famous streets have forgotten

where they were going. Only

a fact could be so dreamlike.

They’re tearing down the houses

we met and lived in,

soon our two bodies will be all

left standing from that era.

3.

We have, as they say,

certain things in common.

I mean: a view

from a bathroom window

over slate to stiff pigeons

huddled every morning; the way

water tastes from our tap,

which you marvel at, letting

it splash into the glass.

Because of you I notice

the taste of water,

a luxury I might

otherwise have missed.

4.

Our words misunderstand us.

Sometimes at night

you are my mother:

old detailed griefs

twitch at my dreams, and I

crawl against you, fighting

for shelter, making you

my cave. Sometimes

you’re the wave of birth

that drowns me in my first

nightmare. I suck the air.

Miscarried knowledge twists us

like hot sheets thrown askew.

5.

Dead winter doesn’t die,

it wears away, a piece of carrion

picked clean at last,

rained away or burnt dry.

Our desiring does this,

make no mistake, I’m speaking

of fact: through mere indifference

we could prevent it.

Only our fierce attention

gets hyacinths out of those

hard cerebral lumps,

unwraps the wet buds down

the whole length of a stem.

1963

Night-Pieces: For a Child

1. The Crib

You sleeping I bend to cover.

Your eyelids work. I see

your dream, cloudy as a negative,

swimming underneath.

You blurt a cry. Your eyes

spring open, still filmed in dream.

Wider, they fix me—

—death’s head, sphinx, medusa?

You scream.

Tears lick my cheeks, my knees

droop at your fear.

Mother I no more am,

but woman, and nightmare.

2. Her Waking

Tonight I jerk astart in a dark

hourless as Hiroshima,

almost hearing you breathe

in a cot three doors away.

You still breathe, yes—

and my dream with its gift of knives,

its murderous hider and seeker,

ebbs away, recoils

back into the egg of dreams,

the vanishing point of mind.

All gone.

But you and I—

swaddled in a dumb dark

old as sickheartedness,

modern as pure annihilation—

we drift in ignorance.

If I could hear you now

mutter some gentle animal sound!

If milk flowed from my breast again. . . .

1964

“I Am in Danger—Sir—”

“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living,

afterward famous in garbled versions,

your hoard of dazzling scraps a battlefield,

now your old snood

mothballed at Harvard

and you in your variorum monument

equivocal to the end—

who are you?

Gardening the day-lily,

wiping the wine-glass stems,

your thought pulsed on behind

a forehead battered paper-thin,

you, woman, masculine

in single-mindedness,

for whom the word was more

than a symptom—

a condition of being.

Till the air buzzing with spoiled language

sang in your ears

of Perjury

and in your half-cracked way you chose

silence for entertainment,

chose to have it out at last

on your own premises.

1964

Mourning Picture

The picture was painted by Edwin Romanzo Elmer

(1850–1923) as a memorial to his daughter Effie.

In the poem, it is the dead girl who speaks.

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker

out under the lilac bush,

and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.

Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,

my doll lies in her wicker pram

gazing at western Massachusetts.

This was our world.

I could remake each shaft of grass

feeling its rasp on my fingers,

draw out the map of every lilac leaf

or the net of veins on my father’s

grief-tranced hand.

Out of my head, half-bursting,

still filling, the dream condenses—

shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew.

Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light

carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars

under high early-summer clouds,

I am Effie, visible and invisible,

remembering and remembered.

They will move from the house,

give the toys and pets away.

Mute and rigid with loss my mother

will ride the train to Baptist Corner,

the silk-spool will run bare.

I tell you, the thread that bound us lies

faint as a web in the dew.

Should I make you, world, again,

could I give back the leaf its skeleton, the air

its early-summer cloud, the house

its noonday presence, shadowless,

and leave this out? I am Effie, you were my dream.

1965

The Knot

In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood.

For years I never saw it,

years of metallic vision,

spears glancing off a bright eyeball,

suns off a Swiss lake.

A foaming meadow; the Milky Way;

and there, all along, the tiny dark-red spider

sitting in the whiteness of the bridal web,

waiting to plunge his crimson knifepoint

into the white apparencies.

Little wonder the eye, healing, sees

for a long time through a mist of blood.

1965

Focus

—for Bert Dreyfus

Obscurity has its tale to tell.

Like the figure on the studio-bed in the corner,

out of range, smoking, watching and waiting.

Sun pours through the skylight onto the worktable

making of a jar of pencils, a typewriter keyboard

more than they were. Veridical light . . .

Earth budges. Now an empty coffee-cup,

a whetstone, a handkerchief, take on

their sacramental clarity, fixed by the wand

of light as the thinker thinks to fix them in the mind.

O secret in the core of the whetstone, in the five

pencils splayed out like fingers of a hand!

The mind’s passion is all for singling out.

Obscurity has another tale to tell.

1965

From

Leaflets

1969

Orion

Far back when I went zig-zagging

through tamarack pastures

you were my genius, you

my cast-iron Viking, my helmed

lion-heart king in prison.

Years later now you’re young

my fierce half-brother, staring

down from that simplified west

your breast open, your belt dragged down

by an oldfashioned thing, a sword

the last bravado you won’t give over

though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are dim

and maybe have stopped burning.

But you burn, and I know it;

as I throw back my head to take you in

an old transfusion happens again:

divine astronomy is nothing to it.

Indoors I bruise and blunder,

break faith, leave ill enough

alone, a dead child born in the dark.

Night cracks up over the chimney,

pieces of time, frozen geodes

come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes

and finds them empty

a woman’s head turns away

from my head in the mirror

children are dying my death

and eating crumbs of my life.

Pity is not your forte.

Calmly you ache up there

pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,

my speechless pirate!

You take it all for granted

and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye

shooting its cold and egotistical spear

where it can do least damage.

Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon

out here in the cold with you

you with your back to the wall.

1965

In the Evening

Three hours chain-smoking words

and you move on. We stand in the porch,

two archaic figures: a woman and a man.

The old masters, the old sources,

haven’t a clue what we’re about,

shivering here in the half-dark ’sixties.

Our minds hover in a famous impasse

and cling together. Your hand

grips mine like a railing on an icy night.

The wall of the house is bleeding. Firethorn!

The moon, cracked every-which-way,

pushes steadily on.

1966

The Demon Lover

Fatigue, regrets. The lights

go out in the parking lot

two by two. Snow blindness

settles over the suburb.

Desire. Desire. The nebula

opens in space, unseen,

your heart utters its great beats

in solitude. A new

era is coming in.

Gauche as we are, it seems

we have to play our part.

A plaid dress, silk scarf,

and eyes that go on stinging.

Woman, stand off. The air

glistens like silk.

She’s gone. In her place stands

a schoolgirl, morning light,

the half-grown bones

of innocence. Is she

your daughter or your muse,

this tree of blondness

grown up in a field of thorns?

Something piercing and marred.

Take note. Look back. When quick

the whole northeast went black

and prisoners howled and children

ran through the night with candles,

who stood off motionless

side by side while the moon swam up

over the drowned houses?

Who neither touched nor spoke?

whose nape, whose finger-ends

nervelessly lied the hours away?

A voice presses at me.

If I give in it won’t

be like the girl the bull rode,

all Rubens flesh and happy moans.

But to be wrestled like a boy

with tongue, hips, knees, nerves, brain . . .

with language?

He doesn’t know. He’s watching

breasts under a striped blouse,

his bull’s head down. The old

wine pours again through my veins.

Goodnight. then. ’Night. Again

we turn our backs and weary

weary we let down.

Things take us hard, no question.

How do you make it, all the way

from here to morning? I touch

you, made of such nerve

and flare and pride and swallowed tears.

Go home. Come to bed. The skies

look in at us, stern.

And this is an old story.

I dreamed about the war.

We were all sitting at table

in a kitchen in Chicago.

The radio had just screamed

that Illinois was the target.

No one felt like leaving,

we sat by the open window

and talked in the sunset.

I’ll tell you that joke tomorrow,

you said with your saddest smile,

if I can remember.

The end is just a straw,

a feather furling slowly down,

floating to light by chance, a breath

on the long-loaded scales.

Posterity trembles like a leaf

and we go on making heirs and heirlooms.

The world, we have to make it,

my coexistent friend said, leaning

back in his cell.

Siberia vastly hulks

behind him, which he did not make.

Oh futile tenderness

of touch in a world like this!

how much longer, dear child,

do you think sex will matter?

There might have been a wedding

that never was:

two creatures sprung free

from castiron covenants.

Instead our hands and minds

erotically waver . . .

Lightness is unavailing.

Catalpas wave and spill

their dull strings across this murk of spring.

I ache, brilliantly.

Only where there is language is there world.

In the harp of my hair, compose me

a song. Death’s in the air,

we all know that. Still, for an hour,

I’d like to be gay. How could a gay song go?

Why that’s your secret, and it shall be mine.

We are our words, and black and bruised and blue.

Under our skins, we’re laughing.

In triste veritas?

Take hold, sweet hands, come on . . .

Broken!

When you falter, all eludes.

This is a seasick way,

this almost/never touching, this

drawing-off, this to-and-fro.

Subtlety stalks in your eyes,

your tongue knows what it knows.

I want your secrets—I will have them out.

Seasick, I drop into the sea.

1966

Jerusalem

In my dream, children

are stoning other children

with blackened carob-pods

I dream my son is riding

on an old grey mare

to a half-dead war

on a dead-grey road

through the cactus and thistles

and dried brook-beds.

In my dream, children

are swaddled in smoke

and their uncut hair smolders

even here, here

where trees have no shade

and rocks have no shadow

trees have no memories

only the stones and

the hairs of the head.

I dream his hair is growing

and has never been shorn

from slender temples hanging

like curls of barbed wire

and his first beard is growing

smoldering like fire

his beard is smoke and fire

and I dream him riding

patiently to the war.

What I dream of the city

is how hard it is to leave

and how useless to walk

outside the blasted walls

picking up the shells

from a half-dead war

and I wake up in tears

and hear the sirens screaming

and the carob-tree is bare.

Balfour Street

July 1966

Night Watch

And now, outside, the walls

of black flint, eyeless.

How pale in sleep you lie.

Love: my love is just a breath

blown on the pane and dissolved.

Everything, even you,

cries silently for help, the web

of the spider is ripped with rain,

the geese fly on into the black cloud.

What can I do for you?

what can I do for you?

Can the touch of a finger mend

what a finger’s touch has broken?

Blue-eyed now, yellow-haired,

I stand in my old nightmare

beside the track, while you,

and over and over and always you

plod into the deathcars.

Sometimes you smile at me

and I—I smile back at you.

How sweet the odor of the station-master’s roses!

How pure, how poster-like the colors of this dream.

1967

For a Russian Poet

1. The winter dream

Everywhere, snow is falling. Your bandaged foot

drags across huge cobblestones, bells

hammer in distant squares.

Everything we stood against has conquered

and now we’re part

of it all. Life’s the main thing, I hear you say,

but a fog is spreading between this landmass

and the one your voice

mapped so long for me. All that’s visible

is walls, endlessly yellow-grey, where

so many risks were taken, the shredded skies

slowly littering both our continents with

the only justice left, burying

footprints, bells and voices with all deliberate speed.

1967

2. Summer in the country

Now, again, every year for years: the life-and-death talk,

late August, forebodings

under the birches, along the water’s edge

and between the typed lines

and evenings, tracing a pattern of absurd hopes

in broken nutshells

but this year we both

sit after dark with the radio

unable to read, unable to write

trying the blurred edges of broadcasts

for a little truth, taking a walk before bed

wondering what a man can do, asking that

at the verge of tears in a lightning-flash of loneliness

3. The demonstration

“Natalya Gorbanevskaya

13/3 Novopeschanaya Street

Apartment 34

At noon we sit down quietly on the parapet

and unfurl our banners

almost immediately

the sound of police whistles

from all corners of Red Square

we sit

quietly and offer no resistance—”

Is this your little boy—?

we will relive this over and over

the banners torn

from our hands

blood flowing

a great jagged torn place

in the silence of complicity

that much at least

we did here

In your flat, drinking tea

waiting for the police

your children asleep while you write

quickly, the letters you want to get off

before tomorrow

I’m a ghost at your table

touching poems in a script I can’t read

we’ll meet each other later

August 1968

Abnegation

The red fox, the vixen

dancing in the half-light among the junipers,

wise-looking in a sexy way,

Egyptian-supple in her sharpness—

what does she want

with the dreams of dead vixens,

the apotheosis of Reynard,

the literature of fox-hunting?

Only in her nerves the past

sings, a thrill of self-preservation.

I go along down the road

to a house nailed together by Scottish

Covenanters, instinct mortified

in a virgin forest,

and she springs toward her den

every hair on her pelt alive

with tidings of the immaculate present.

They left me a westernness,

a birthright, a redstained, ravelled

afghan of sky.

She has no archives,

no heirlooms, no future

except death

and I could be more

her sister than theirs

who chopped their way across these hills

—a chosen people.

1968

Implosions

The world’s

not wanton

only wild and wavering

I wanted to choose words that even you

would have to be changed by

Take the word

of my pulse, loving and ordinary

Send out your signals, hoist

your dark scribbled flags

but take

my hand

All wars are useless to the dead

My hands are knotted in the rope

and I cannot sound the bell

My hands are frozen to the switch

and I cannot throw it

The foot is in the wheel

When it’s finished and we’re lying

in a stubble of blistered flowers

eyes gaping, mouths staring

dusted with crushed arterial blues

I’ll have done nothing

even for you?

1968

On Edges

When the ice starts to shiver

all across the reflecting basin

or water-lily leaves

dissect a simple surface

the word drowning flows through me.

You built a glassy floor

that held me

as I leaned to fish for old

hooks and toothed tin cans,

stems lashing out like ties of

silk dressing-gowns

archangels of lake-light

gripped in mud.

Now you hand me a torn letter.

On my knees, in the ashes, I could never

fit these ripped-up flakes together.

In the taxi I am still piecing

what syllables I can

translating at top speed like a thinking machine

that types out useless as monster

and history as lampshade.

Crossing the bridge I need all my nerve

to trust to the man-made cables.

The blades on that machine

could cut you to ribbons

but its function is humane.

Is this all I can say of these

delicate hooks, scythe-curved intentions

you and I handle? I’d rather

taste blood, yours or mine, flowing

from a sudden slash, than cut all day

with blunt scissors on dotted lines

like the teacher told.

1968

Leaflets

1.

The big star, and that other

lonely on black glass

overgrown with frozen

lesions, endless night

the Coal Sack gaping

black veins of ice on the pane

spelling a word:

Insomnia

not manic but ordinary

to start out of sleep

turning off and on

this seasick neon

vision, this

division

the head clears of sweet smoke

and poison gas

life without caution

the only worth living

love for a man

love for a woman

love for the facts

protectless

that self-defense be not

the arm’s first motion

memory not only

cards of identity

that I can live half a year

as I have never lived up to this time—

Chekhov coughing up blood almost daily

the steamer edging in toward the penal colony

chained men dozing on deck

five forest fires lighting the island

lifelong that glare, waiting.

2.

Your face

stretched like a mask

begins to tear

as you speak of Che Guevara

Bolivia, Nanterre

I’m too young to be your mother

you’re too young to be my brother

your tears are not political

they are real water, burning

as the tears of Telemachus

burned

Over Spanish Harlem the moon

swells up, a fire balloon

fire gnawing the edge

of this crushed-up newspaper

now

the bodies come whirling

coal-black, ash-white

out of torn windows

and the death columns blacken

whispering

Who’d choose this life?

We’re fighting for a slash of recognition,

a piercing to the pierced heart.

Tell me what you are going through—

but the attention flickers and will flicker

a matchflame in poison air

a thread, a hair of light: sum of all answer

to the Know that I exist! of all existing things.

3.

If, says the Dahomeyan devil,

someone has courage to enter the fire

the young man will be restored to life.

If, the girl whispers,

I do not go into the fire

I will not be able to live with my soul.

(Her face calm and dark as amber

under the dyed butterfly turban

her back scarified in ostrich-skin patterns.)

4.

Crusaders’ wind glinting

off linked scales of sea

ripping the ghostflags

galloping at the fortress

Acre, bloodcaked, lionhearted

raw vomit curdling in the sun

gray walkers walking

straying with a curbed intentness

in and out the inclosures

the gallows, the photographs

of dead Jewish terrorists, aged 15

their fading faces wide-eyed

and out in the crusading sunlight

gray strayers still straying

dusty paths

the mad who live in the dried-up moat

of the War Museum

what are we coming to

what wants these things of us

who wants them

5.

The strain of being born

over and over has torn your smile into pieces

Often I have seen it broken

and then re-membered

and wondered how a beauty

so anarch, so ungelded

will be cared for in this world.

I want to hand you this

leaflet streaming with rain or tears

but the words coming clear

something you might find crushed into your hand

after passing a barricade

and stuff in your raincoat pocket.

I want this to reach you

who told me once that poetry is nothing sacred

—no more sacred that is

than other things in your life—

to answer yes, if life is uncorrupted

no better poetry is wanted.

I want this to be yours

in the sense that if you find and read it

it will be there in you already

and the leaflet then merely something

to leave behind, a little leaf

in the drawer of a sublet room.

What else does it come down to

but handing on scraps of paper

little figurines or phials

no stronger than the dry clay they are baked in

yet more than dry clay or paper

because the imagination crouches in them.

If we needed fire to remind us

that all true images

were scooped out of the mud

where our bodies curse and flounder

then perhaps that fire is coming

to sponge away the scribes and time-servers

and much that you would have loved will be lost as well

before you could handle it and know it

just as we almost miss each other

in the ill cloud of mistrust, who might have touched

hands quickly, shared food or given blood

for each other. I am thinking how we can use what we have

to invent what we need.

Winter–Spring 1968

from Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib

7/12/68

—for Sheila Rotner

The clouds are electric in this university.

The lovers astride the tractor burn fissures through the hay.

When I look at that wall I shall think of you

and of what you did not paint there.

Only the truth makes the pain of lifting a hand worthwhile:

the prism staggering under the blows of the raga.

The vanishing-point is the point where he appears.

Two parallel tracks converge, yet there has been no wreck.

To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable

is to throw away the search for the one necessary word.

When you read these lines, think of me

and of what I have not written here.

7/14/68: i

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice.

How many times a day, in this city, are those words spoken?

The tears of the universe aren’t all stars, Danton;

some are satellites of brushed aluminum and stainless steel.

He, who was temporary, has joined eternity;

he has deserted us, gone over to the other side.

In the Theatre of the Dust no actor becomes famous.

In the last scene they all are blown away like dust.

“It may be if I had known them I would have loved them.”

You were American, Whitman, and those words are yours.

7/14/68: ii

Did you think I was talking about my life?

I was trying to drive a tradition up against the wall.

The field they burned over is greener than all the rest.

You have to watch it, he said, the sparks can travel the roots.

Shot back into this earth’s atmosphere

our children’s children may photograph these stones.

In the red wash of the darkroom, I see myself clearly;

when the print is developed and handed about, the face

is nothing to me.

For us the work undoes itself over and over:

the grass grows back, the dust collects, the scar breaks open.

7/16/68: i

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—

five green hours and forty violet minutes.

A cold spring slowed our lilacs, till a surf broke

violet/white, tender and sensual, misread it if you dare.

I tell you, truth is, at the moment, here

burning outward through our skins.

Eternity streams through my body:

touch it with your hand and see.

Till the walls of the tunnel cave in

and the black river walks on our faces.

7/16/68: ii

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed

as if by snow, or fire, or physical desire.

First snow. Death of the city. Ghosts in the air.

Your shade among the shadows, interviewing the mist.

The mail came every day, but letters were missing;

by this I knew things were not what they ought to be.

The trees in the long park blurring back

into Olmsted’s original dream-work.

The impartial scholar writes me from under house arrest.

I hope you are rotting in hell, Montaigne you bastard.

7/26/68: i

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry.

Today you needn’t write; the wall has tumbled down.

We were taught to respect the appearance behind the reality.

Our senses were out on parole, under surveillance.

A pair of eyes imprisoned for years inside my skull

is burning its way outward, the headaches are terrible.

I’m walking through a rubble of broken sculpture, stumbling

here on the spine of a friend, there on the hand of a brother.

All those joinings! and yet we fought so hard to be unique.

Neither alone, nor in anyone’s arms, will we end up sleeping.

8/1/68

The order of the small town on the riverbank,

forever at war with the order of the dark and starlit soul.

Were you free then all along, Jim, free at last,

of everything but the white boy’s fantasies?

We pleaded guilty till we saw what rectitude was like:

its washed hands, and dead nerve, and sclerotic eye.

I long ago stopped dreaming of pure justice, your honor—

my crime was to believe we could make cruelty obsolete.

The body has been exhumed from the burnt-out bunker;

the teeth counted, the contents of the stomach told over.

And you, Custer, the Squaw-killer, hero of primitive schoolrooms

where are you buried, what is the condition of your bones?

8/4/68

—for Aijaz Ahmad

If these are letters, they will have to be misread.

If scribblings on a wall, they must tangle with all the others.

Fuck reds  Black Power  Angel loves Rosita

—and a transistor radio answers in Spanish: Night must fall.

Prisoners, soldiers, crouching as always, writing,

explaining the unforgivable to a wife, a mother, a lover.

Those faces are blurred and some have turned away

to which I used to address myself so hotly.

How is it, Ghalib, that your grief, resurrected in pieces,

has found its way to this room from your dark house in Delhi?

When they read this poem of mine, they are translators.

Every existence speaks a language of its own.

8/8/68: i

From here on, all of us will be living

like Galileo turning his first tube at the stars.

Obey the little laws and break the great ones

is the preamble to their constitution.

Even to hope is to leap into the unknown,

under the mocking eyes of the way things are.

There’s a war on earth, and in the skull, and in the glassy spaces,

between the existing and the non-existing.

I need to live each day through, have them and know them all,

though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.

8/8/68: ii

—for A.H.C.

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

some weaving figured as magic against oppression.

I’m speaking to you as a woman to a man:

when your blood flows I want to hold you in my arms.

How did we get caught up fighting this forest fire,

we, who were only looking for a still place in the woods?

How frail we are, and yet, dispersed, always returning,

the barnacles they keep scraping from the warship’s hull.

The hairs on your breast curl so lightly as you lie there,

while the strong heart goes on pounding in its sleep.

From

The Will to Change

1971

November 1968

Stripped

you’re beginning to float free

up through the smoke of brushfires

and incinerators

the unleafed branches won’t hold you

nor the radar aerials

You’re what the autumn knew would happen

after the last collapse

of primary color

once the last absolutes were torn to pieces

you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you

until this moment

I know nothing about it

my ignorance of you amazes me

now that I watch you

starting to give yourself away

to the wind

1968

Study of History

Out there.  The mind of the river

as it might be you.

Lights  blotted by unseen hulls

repetitive shapes passing

dull foam crusting the margin

barges sunk below the water-line with silence.

The scow, drudging on.

Lying in the dark, to think of you

and your harsh traffic

gulls pecking your rubbish natural historians

mourning your lost purity

pleasure cruisers

witlessly careening you

but this

after all

is the narrows and after

all we have never entirely

known what was done to you upstream

what powers trepanned

which of your channels diverted

what rockface leaned to stare

in your upturned

defenseless

face.

1968

Planetarium

Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)

astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster

a monster in the shape of a woman

the skies are full of them

a woman  ‘in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments

or measuring the ground with poles’

in her 98 years to discover

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled

like us

levitating into the night sky

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness

ribs chilled

in those spaces  of the mind

An eye,

‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’

from the mad webs of Uranusborg

encountering the NOVA

every impulse of light exploding

from the core

as life flies out of us

Tycho whispering at last

‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’

What we see, we see

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse

pouring in from Taurus

I am bombarded yet  I stand

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep  so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15

years to travel through me  And has

taken  I am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into images  for the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.

1968

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

I was in danger of

verbalizing my moral

impulses out of existence.

—Daniel Berrigan,

on trial in Baltimore.

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

Back there: the library, walled

with green Britannicas

Looking again

in Dürer’s Complete Works

for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus

the Book of the Dead

the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue

I think, It is her color

and they take the book away

because I dream of her too often

love and fear in a house

knowledge of the oppressor

I know it hurts to burn

2. To imagine a time of silence

or few words

a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks

traced by my hand

or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue  this slab of limestone

or reinforced concrete

fanatics and traders

dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred

that breathed once

in signals of smoke

sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor

this is the oppressor’s language

yet I need it to talk to you

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

(the fracture of order

the repair of speech

to overcome this suffering)

4. We lie under the sheet

after making love, speaking

of loneliness

relieved in a book

relived in a book

so on that page

the clot and fissure

of it appears

words of a man

in pain

a naked word

entering the clot

a hand grasping

through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us

has happened for centuries

we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy

outflung hand

beating bed

dryness of mouth

after panting

there are books that describe all this

and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house

there in that country

you find a temple

built eighteen hundred years ago

you enter without knowing

what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen

though the books tell everything

burn the texts  said Artaud

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

1968

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown

under an arcade.

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

and those powers severely limited

by authorities whose faces I rarely see.

I am a woman in the prime of life

driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce

through a landscape of twilight and thorns.

A woman with a certain mission

which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.

A woman with the nerves of a panther

a woman with contacts among Hell’s Angels

a woman feeling the fullness of her powers

at the precise moment when she must not use them

a woman sworn to lucidity

who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires

of these underground streets

her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind

on the wrong side of the mirror

1968

Letters: March 1969

1.

Foreknown. The victor

sees the disaster through and through.

His soles grind rocksalt

from roads of the resistance.

He shoulders through rows

of armored faces

he might have loved and lived among.

The victory carried like a corpse

from town to town

begins to crawl in the casket.

The summer swindled on

from town to town, our train

stopping and broiling on the rails

long enough to let on who we were.

The disaster sat up with us all night

drinking bottled water, eating fruit,

talking of the conditions that prevailed.

Outside along the railroad cut

they were singing for our death.

2.

Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe.

How little it takes

to restore composure.

White napkins, a tray

of napoleons and cherry tarts

compliments of the airline

which has flown us out of danger.

They are torturing the journalist we drank with

last night in the lounge

but we can’t be sure of that

here overlooking the runway

three hours and twenty minutes into another life.

If this is done for us

(and this is done for us)

if we are well men wearing bandages

for disguise

if we can choose our scene

stay out of earshot

break the roll and pour

from the clean carafe

if we can desert like soldiers

abjure like thieves

we may well purchase new virtues at the gate

of the other world.

3.

“I am up at sunrise

collecting data.

The reservoir burns green.

Darling, the knives they have on this block alone

would amaze you.

When they ask my profession I say

I’m a student of weapons systems.

The notes I’m putting together are purely

of sentimental value

my briefcase is I swear useless

to foreign powers, to the police

I am not given I say

to revealing my sources

to handing round copies

of my dossier for perusal.

The vulnerable go unarmed.

I myself walk the floor

a ruinously expensive Swiss hunting knife

exposed in my brain

eight blades, each one for a distinct purpose,

laid open as on the desk

of an importer or a fence.”

4.

Six months back

send carbons you said

but this winter’s dashed off in pencil

torn off the pad too fast

for those skills. In the dawn taxi

in the kitchen

burning the succotash

the more I love my life the more

I love you. In a time

of fear. In a city

of fears. In a life

without vacations the paisley fades

winter and summer in the sun

but the best time is now.

My sick friend writes: what’s love?

This life is nothing, Adrienne!

Her hands bled onto the sill.

She had that trick of reaching outward,

the pane was smashed but only

the calvinist northwind

spat in from the sea.

She’s a shot hero. A dying poet.

Even now, if we went for her—

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

She stays in with her mirrors and anger.

I tear up answers

I once gave, postcards

from riot and famine go up on the walls

valentines stuck in the mirror

flame and curl, loyalties dwindle

the bleak light dries our tears

without relief. I keep coming back to you

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

I have no carbons. Prince of pity,

what eats out of your hand?

the rodent pain, electric

with exhaustion, mazed and shaken?

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

but my lips were trembling.

Tell me how to bear myself,

how it’s done, the light kiss falling

accurately

on the cracked palm.

1969

The Stelae

—for Arnold Rich

Last night I met you in my sister’s house

risen from the dead

showing me your collection

You are almost at the point of giving things away

It’s the stelae on the walls I want

that I never saw before

You offer other objects

I have seen time and time again

I think you think you are giving me

something precious

The stelae are so unlike you

swart, indifferent, incised with signs

you have never deciphered

I never knew you had them

I wonder if you are giving them away

1969

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.

The grammar turned and attacked me.

Themes, written under duress.

Emptiness of the notations.

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

I want you to see this before I leave:

the experience of repetition as death

the failure of criticism to locate the pain

the poster in the bus that said:

my bleeding is under control.

A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.

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

These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.

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

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

I could say: those mountains have a meaning

but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

1970

from Shooting Script

Part I 11/69–2/70

1.

We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation.

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

A monologue waiting for you to interrupt it.

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

breaker.

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

wave returning over and over.

The dialogue that lasts all night or a whole lifetime.

A conversation of sounds melting constantly into rhythms.

A shell waiting for you to listen.

A tide that ebbs and flows against a deserted continent.

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

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

where we hang together in the turning of an endless

conversation.

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

A monologue that waits for one listener.

An ear filled with one sound only.

A shell penetrated by meaning.

4.

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

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

stones by methods we can only guess at.

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

were seeing?

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

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

solution for us now.

Defoliation progresses; concrete is poured, sheets of glass hauled

overland in huge trucks and at great cost.

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

final mile.

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

woods.

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

away.

5.

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

them like red clay roads they have been walking.

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

learned by heart and worn close to the body.

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

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

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

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

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

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

me.

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

lies in shatters on a back shelf.

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

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

Part II 3–7/70

9.

NEWSREEL

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

heavier, there were no hills of that size there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

fuselage burning among the ferns.

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

through the darkness, finding my place among the sleepers and

masturbators in the dark.

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

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

they were living.

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

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

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

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

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

this size.

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

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

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

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

this would not be the war I fought in.

12.

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

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

steeped in sun.

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

that window a long time.

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

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

do I know that I am living in the west.

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

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

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

like a seed-pod.

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

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

mistake will soon be clear.

Vacillant needles of Manhattan, describing hour & weather; buying

these descriptions at the cost of missing every other point.

13.

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

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

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

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

of incompetence.

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

special training and my own training was against me.

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

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

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

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

14.

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

ashes spilled on white formica.

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

on stainless steel.

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

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

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

web of cracks filtering across the plaster.

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

initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.

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

lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.

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

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

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

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

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

your old neighborhood.

From

Diving into the Wreck

1973

Trying to Talk with a Man

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that’s why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river

forcing its way between deformed cliffs

an acute angle of understanding

moving itself like a locus of the sun

into this condemned scenery.

What we’ve had to give up to get here—

whole LP collections, films we starred in

playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows

full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,

the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,

afternoons on the riverbank

pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert

we meant to change the face of

driving among dull green succulents

walking at noon in the ghost town

surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of the place

except that it came with us

and is familiar

and everything we were saying until now

was an effort to blot it out—

coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless

with you than without you

You mention the danger

and list the equipment

we talk of people caring for each other

in emergencies—laceration, thirst—

but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power

your eyes are stars of a different magnitude

they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT

when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger

as if it were not ourselves

as if we were testing anything else.

1971

When We Dead Awaken

—for E.Y.

Trying to tell you how

the anatomy of the park

through stained panes, the way

guerrillas are advancing

through minefields, the trash

burning endlessly in the dump

to return to heaven like a stain—

everything outside our skins is an image

of this affliction:

stones on my table, carried by hand

from scenes I trusted

souvenirs of what I once described

as happiness

everything outside my skin

speaks of the fault that sends me limping

even the scars of my decisions

even the sunblaze in the mica-vein

even you, fellow-creature, sister,

sitting across from me, dark with love,

working like me to pick apart

working with me to remake

this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness,

this woman’s garment, trying to save the skein.

2.

The fact of being separate

enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture

—a chest of seventeenth-century wood

from somewhere in the North.

It has a huge lock shaped like a woman’s head

but the key has not been found.

In the compartments are other keys

to lost doors, an eye of glass.

Slowly you begin to add

things of your own.

You come and go reflected in its panels.

You give up keeping track of anniversaries,

you begin to write in your diaries

more honestly than ever.

3.

The lovely landscape of southern Ohio

betrayed by strip mining, the

thick gold band on the adulterer’s finger

the blurred programs of the offshore pirate station

are causes for hesitation.

Here in the matrix of need and anger, the

disproof of what we thought possible

failures of medication

doubts of another’s existence

—tell it over and over, the words

get thick with unmeaning—

yet never have we been closer to the truth

of the lies we were living, listen to me:

the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed

flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing

the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.

1971

From the Prison House

Underneath my lids another eye has opened

it looks nakedly

at the light

that soaks in from the world of pain

even when I sleep

Steadily it regards

everything I am going through

and more

it sees the clubs and rifle-butts

rising and falling

it sees

detail not on TV

the fingers of the policewoman

searching the cunt of the young prostitute

it sees

the roaches dropping into the pan

where they cook the pork

in the House of D

it sees

the violence

embedded in silence

This eye

is not for weeping

its vision

must be unblurred

though tears are on my face

its intent is clarity

it must forget

nothing

1971

The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One

1.

She is the one you call sister.

Her simplest act has glamor,

as when she scales a fish the knife

flashes in her long fingers

no motion wasted or when

rapidly talking of love

she steel-wool burnishes

the battered kettle

Love apples cramp you sideways

with sudden emptiness

the cereals glutting you, the grains

ripe clusters picked by hand

Love: the refrigerator

with open door

the ripe steaks bleeding

their hearts out in plastic film

the whipped butter, the apricots

the sour leftovers

A crate is waiting in the orchard

for you to fill it

your hands are raw with scraping

the sharp bark, the thorns

of this succulent tree

Pick, pick, pick

this harvest is a failure

the juice runs down your cheekbones

like sweat or tears

2.

She is the one you call sister

you blaze like lightning about the room

flicker around her like fire

dazzle yourself in her wide eyes

listing her unfelt needs

thrusting the tenets of your life

into her hands

She moves through a world of India print

her body dappled

with softness, the paisley swells at her hip

walking the street in her cotton shift

buying fresh figs because you love them

photographing the ghetto because you took her there

Why are you crying dry up your tears

we are sisters

words fail you in the stare of her hunger

you hand her another book

scored by your pencil

you hand her a record

of two flutes in India reciting

3.

Late summer night the insects

fry in the yellowed lightglobe

your skin burns gold in its light

In this mirror, who are you? Dreams of the nunnery

with its discipline, the nursery

with its nurse, the hospital

where all the powerful ones are masked

the graveyard where you sit on the graves

of women who died in childbirth

and women who died at birth

Dreams of your sister’s birth

your mother dying in childbirth over and over

not knowing how to stop

bearing you over and over

your mother dead and you unborn

your two hands grasping your head

drawing it down against the blade of life

your nerves the nerves of a midwife

learning her trade

1971

Dialogue

She sits with one hand poised against her head, the

other turning an old ring to the light

for hours our talk has beaten

like rain against the screens

a sense of August and heat-lightning

I get up, go to make tea, come back

we look at each other

then she says (and this is what I live through

over and over)—she says: I do not know

if sex is an illusion

I do not know

who I was when I did those things

or who I said I was

or whether I willed to feel

what I had read about

or who in fact was there with me

or whether I knew, even then

that there was doubt about these things

1972

Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it’s a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides

you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

1972

Song

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:

OK then, yes, I’m lonely

as a plane rides lonely and level

on its radio beam, aiming

across the Rockies

for the blue-strung aisles

of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?

Well, of course, lonely

as a woman driving across country

day after day, leaving behind

mile after mile

little towns she might have stopped

and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely

it must be the loneliness

of waking first, of breathing

dawn’s first cold breath on the city

of being the one awake

in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely

it’s with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore

in the last red light of the year

that knows what it is, that knows it’s neither

ice nor mud nor winter light

but wood, with a gift for burning

1971

The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message

A man in terror of impotence

or infertility, not knowing the difference

a man trying to tell something

howling from the climacteric

music of the entirely

isolated soul

yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego

music without the ghost

of another person in it, music

trying to tell something the man

does not want out, would keep if he could

gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy

where everything is silence and the

beating of a bloody fist upon

a splintered table

1972

Rape

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:

he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,

had certain ideals.

You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,

on horseback, one hand touching his gun.

You hardly know him but you have to get to know him:

he has access to machinery that could kill you.

He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,

his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud

from between his unsmiling lips.

And so, when the time comes, you have to turn to him,

the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,

your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess

to him, you are guilty of the crime

of having been forced.

And you see his blue eyes, the blue eyes of all the family

whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,

his hand types out the details

and he wants them all

but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.

You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:

he has taken down your worst moment

on a machine and filed it in a file.

He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;

he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.

He has access to machinery that could get you put away;

and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,

will you swallow, will you deny them, will you lie your way home?

1972

Burning Oneself In

In a bookstore on the East Side

I read a veteran’s testimony:

the running down, for no reason,

of an old woman in South Vietnam

by a U.S. Army truck

The heat-wave is over

Lifeless, sunny, the East Side

rests under its awnings

Another summer

The flames go on feeding

and a dull heat permeates the ground

of the mind, the burn has settled in

as if it had no more question

of its right to go on devouring

the rest of a lifetime,

the rest of history

Pieces of information, like this one

blow onto the heap

they keep it fed, whether we will it or not,

another summer, and another

of suffering quietly

in bookstores, in the parks

however we may scream we are

suffering quietly

1972

From a Survivor

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact

of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were

that our personalities

could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know

the race had failures of that order

and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me

as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:

I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer

the body of a god

or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years

and you are wastefully dead

who might have made the leap

we talked, too late, of making

which I live now

not as a leap

but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next

1972

August

Two horses in yellow light

eating windfall apples under a tree

as summer tears apart  milkweeds stagger

and grasses grow more ragged

They say there are ions in the sun

neutralizing magnetic fields on earth

Some way to explain

what this week has been, and the one before it!

If I am flesh sunning on rock

if I am brain burning in fluorescent light

if I am dream like a wire with fire

throbbing along it

if I am death to man

I have to know it

His mind is too simple, I cannot go on

sharing his nightmares

My own are becoming clearer, they open

into prehistory

which looks like a village lit with blood

where all the fathers are crying: My son is mine!

1972

Uncollected Poems

1950–1974

The Prisoners

Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood,

Wounded alike by thorns of the same tree,

We seek in hopeless war each others’ blood

Though suffering in one identity.

Each to the other prey and huntsman known,

Still driven together, lonelier than alone.

Strange mating of the loser and the lost!

With faces stiff as mourners’, we intrude

Forever on the one each turns from most,

Each wandering in a double solitude.

The unpurged ghosts of passion bound by pride

Who wake in isolation, side by side.

1950

At the Jewish New Year

For more than five thousand years

This calm September day

With yellow in the leaf

Has lain in the kernel of Time

While the world outside the walls

Has had its turbulent say

And history like a long

Snake has crawled on its way

And is crawling onward still.

And we have little to tell

On this or any feast

Except of the terrible past.

Five thousand years are cast

Down before the wondering child

Who must expiate them all.

Some of us have replied

In the bitterness of youth

Or the qualms of middle-age:

“If Time is unsatisfied,

And all our fathers have suffered

Can never be enough,

Why, then, we choose to forget.

Let our forgetting begin

With those age-old arguments

In which their minds were wound

Like musty phylacteries;

And we choose to forget as well

Those cherished histories

That made our old men fond,

And already are strange to us.

“Or let us, being today

Too rational to cry out,

Or trample underfoot

What after all preserves

A certain savor yet—

Though torn up by the roots—

Let us make our compromise

With the terror and the guilt

And view as curious relics

Once found in daily use

The mythology, the names

That, however Time has corrupted

Their ancient purity

Still burn like yellow flames,

But their fire is not for us.”

And yet, however we choose

To deny or to remember,

Though on the calendars

We wake and suffer by,

This day is merely one

Of thirty in September—

In the kernel of the mind

The new year must renew

This day, as for our kind

Over five thousand years,

The task of being ourselves.

Whatever we strain to forget,

Our memory must be long.

May the taste of honey linger

Under the bitterest tongue.

1955

Dien Bien Phu

A nurse on the battlefield

wounded herself, but working

dreams

that each man she touches

is a human grenade

an anti-personnel weapon

that can explode in her arms

How long

can she go on like this

putting mercy

ahead of survival

She is walking

in a white dress stained

with earth and blood

down a road lined

with fields long

given up   blasted

cemeteries of one name

or two

A hand

juts out like barbed wire

it is terribly alone

if she takes it

will it slash her wrists again

if she passes it by

will she turn into a case

of shell-shock, eyes

glazed forever on the

blank chart of

amnesia

1973

Re-forming the Crystal

I am trying to imagine

how it feels to you

to want a woman

trying to hallucinate

desire

centered in a cock

focused like a burning-glass

desire without discrimination:

to want a woman like a fix

Desire: yes: the sudden knowledge, like coming out of ’flu, that the body is sexual. Walking in the streets with that knowledge. That evening in the plane from Pittsburgh, fantasizing going to meet you. Walking through the airport blazing with energy and joy. But knowing all along that you were not the source of that energy and joy; you were a man, a stranger, a name, a voice on the telephone, a friend; this desire was mine, this energy my energy; it could be used a hundred ways, and going to meet you could be one of them.

Tonight is a different kind of night.

I sit in the car, racing the engine,

calculating the thinness of the ice.

In my head I am already threading the beltways

that rim this city,

all the old roads that used to wander the country

having been lost.

Tonight I understand

my photo on the license is not me,

my

name on the marriage-contract was not mine.

If I remind you of my father’s favorite daughter,

look again. The woman

I needed to call my mother

was silenced before I was born.

Tonight if the battery charges I want to take the car out on sheet-ice; I want to understand my fear both of the machine and of the accidents of nature. My desire for you is not trivial; I can compare it with the greatest of those accidents. But the energy it draws on might lead to racing a cold engine, cracking the frozen spiderweb, parachuting into the field of a poem wired with danger, or to a trip through gorges and canyons, into the cratered night of female memory, where delicately and with intense care the chieftainess inscribes upon the ribs of the volcano the name of the one she has chosen.

1973

White Night

Light at a window. Someone up

at this snail-still hour.

We who work this way have often worked

in solitude. I’ve had to guess at her

sewing her skin together as I sew mine

though

with a different

stitch.

Dawn after dawn, this neighbor

burns like a candle

dragging her bedspread through the dark house

to her dark bed

her head

full of runes, syllables, refrains,

this accurate dreamer

sleepwalks the kitchen

like a white moth,

an elephant, a guilt.

Somebody tried to put her

to rest under an afghan

knitted with wools the color of grass and blood

but she has risen. Her lamplight

licks at the icy panes

and melts into the dawn.

They will never prevent her

who sleep the stone sleep of the past,

the sleep of the drugged.

One crystal second, I flash

an eye across the cold

unwrapping of light between us

into her darkness-lancing eye

—that’s all. Dawn is the test, the agony

but we were meant to see it:

After this, we may sleep, my sister,

while the flames rise higher and higher, we can sleep.

1974

From an Old House in America

1.

Deliberately, long ago

the carcasses

of old bugs crumbled

into the rut of the window

and we started sleeping here

Fresh June bugs batter this June’s

screens, June-lightning batters

the spiderweb

I sweep the wood-dust

from the wood-box

the snout of the vacuum cleaner

sucks the past away

2.

Other lives were lived here:

mostly un-articulate

yet someone left her creamy signature

in the trail of rusticated

narcissus straggling up

through meadowgrass and vetch

Families breathed close

boxed-in from the cold

hard times, short growing season

the old rainwater cistern

hulks in the cellar

3.

Like turning through the contents of a drawer:

these rusted screws, this empty vial

useless, this box of watercolor paints

dried to insolubility—

but this—

this pack of cards with no card missing

still playable

and three good fuses

and this toy: a little truck

scarred red, yet all its wheels still turn

The humble tenacity of things

waiting for people, waiting for months, for years

4.

Often rebuked, yet always back returning

I place my hand on the hand

of the dead, invisible palm-print

on the doorframe

spiked with daylilies, green leaves

catching in the screen door

or I read the backs of old postcards

curling from thumbtacks, winter and summer

fading through cobweb-tinted panes—

white church in Norway

Dutch hyacinths bleeding azure

red beach on Corsica

set-pieces of the world

stuck to this house of plank

I flash on wife and husband

embattled, in the years

that dried, dim ink was wet

those signatures

5.

If they call me man-hater, you

would have known it for a lie

but the you I want to speak to

has become your death

If I dream of you these days

I know my dreams are mine and not of you

yet something hangs between us

older and stranger than ourselves

like a translucent curtain, a sheet of water

a dusty window

the irreducible, incomplete connection

between the dead and living

or between man and woman in this

savagely fathered and unmothered world

6.

The other side of a translucent

curtain, a sheet of water

a dusty window, Non-being

utters its flat tones

the speech of an actor learning his lines

phonetically

the final autistic statement

of the self-destroyer

All my energy reaches out tonight

to comprehend a miracle beyond

raising the dead: the undead to watch

back on the road of birth

7.

I am an American woman:

I turn that over

like a leaf pressed in a book

I stop and look up from

into the coals of the stove

or the black square of the window

Foot-slogging through the Bering Strait

jumping from the Arbella to my death

chained to the corpse beside me

I feel my pains begin

I am washed up on this continent

shipped here to be fruitful

my body a hollow ship

bearing sons to the wilderness

sons who ride away

on horseback, daughters

whose juices drain like mine

into the arroyo of stillbirths, massacres

Hanged as witches, sold as breeding-wenches

my sisters leave me

I am not the wheatfield

nor the virgin forest

I never chose this place

yet I am of it now

In my decent collar, in the daguerreotype

I pierce its legend with my look

my hands wring the necks of prairie chickens

I am used to blood

When the men hit the hobo track

I stay on with the children

my power is brief and local

but I know my power

I have lived in isolation

from other women, so much

in the mining camps, the first cities

the Great Plains winters

Most of the time, in my sex, I was alone

8.

Tonight in this northeast kingdom

striated iris stand in a jar with daisies

the porcupine gnaws in the shed

fireflies beat and simmer

caterpillars begin again

their long, innocent climb

the length of leaves of burdock

or webbing of a garden chair

plain and ordinary things

speak softly

the light square on old wallpaper

where a poster has fallen down

Robert Indiana’s LOVE

leftover of a decade

9.

I do not want to simplify

Or: I would simplify

by naming the complexity

It was made over-simple all along

the separation of powers

the allotment of sufferings

her spine cracking in labor

his plow driving across the Indian graves

her hand unconscious on the cradle, her mind

with the wild geese

his mother-hatred driving him

into exile from the earth

the refugee couple with their cardboard luggage

standing on the ramshackle landing-stage

he with fingers frozen around his Law

she with her down quilt sewn through iron nights

—the weight of the old world, plucked

drags after them, a random feather-bed

10.

Her children dead of diphtheria, she

set herself on fire with kerosene

(O Lord I was unworthy

Thou didst find me out)

she left the kitchen scrubbed

down to the marrow of its boards

“The penalty for barrenness

is emptiness

my punishment is my crime

what I have failed to do, is me . . .”

—Another month without a show

and this the seventh year

O Father let this thing pass out of me

I swear to You

I will live for the others, asking nothing

I will ask nothing, ever, for myself

11.

Out back of this old house

datura tangles with a gentler weed

its spiked pods smelling

of bad dreams and death

I reach through the dark, groping

past spines of nightmare

to brush the leaves of sensuality

A dream of tenderness

wrestles with all I know of history

I cannot now lie down

with a man who fears my power

or reaches for me as for death

or with a lover who imagines

we are not in danger

12.

If it was lust that had defined us—

their lust and fear of our deep places

we have done our time

as faceless torsos licked by fire

we are in the open, on our way—

our counterparts

the pinyon jay, the small

gilt-winged insect

the Cessna throbbing level

the raven floating in the gorge

the rose and violet vulva of the earth

filling with darkness

yet deep within a single sparkle

of red, a human fire

and near and yet above the western planet

calmly biding her time

13.

They were the distractions, lust and fear

but are

themselves a key

Everything that can be used, will be:

the fathers in their ceremonies

the genital contests

the cleansing of blood from pubic hair

the placenta buried and guarded

their terror of blinding

by the look of her who bore them

If you do not believe

that fear and hatred

read the lesson again

in the old dialect

14.

But can’t you see me as a human being

he said

What is a human being

she said

I try to understand

he said

what will you undertake

she said

will you punish me for history

he said

what will you undertake

she said

do you believe in collective guilt

he said

let me look in your eyes

she said

15.

Who is here. The Erinyes.

One to sit in judgment.

One to speak tenderness.

One to inscribe the verdict on the canyon wall.

If you have not confessed

the damage

if you have not recognized

the Mother of reparations

if you have not come to terms

with the women in the mirror

if you have not come to terms

with the inscription

the terms of the ordeal

the discipline  the verdict

if still you are on your way

still She awaits your coming

16.

“Such women are dangerous

to the order of things”

and yes, we will be dangerous

to ourselves

groping through spines of nightmare

(datura tangling with a simpler herb)

because the line dividing

lucidity from darkness

is yet to be marked out

Isolation, the dream

of the frontier woman

leveling her rifle along

the homestead fence

still snares our pride

—a suicidal leaf

laid under the burning-glass

in the sun’s eye

Any woman’s death diminishes me

1974

The Fact of a Doorframe

means there is something to hold

onto with both hands

while slowly thrusting my forehead against the wood

and taking it away

one of the oldest motions of suffering

as Makeba sings

a courage-song for warriors

music is suffering made powerful

I think of the story

of the goose-girl who passed through the high gate

where the head of her favorite mare

was nailed to the arch

and in a human voice

If she could see thee now, thy mother’s heart would break

said the head

of Falada

Now, again, poetry,

violent, arcane, common,

hewn of the commonest living substance

into archway, portal, frame

I grasp for you, your bloodstained splinters, your

ancient and stubborn poise

—as the earth trembles—

burning out from the grain

1974

From

The Dream of a Common Language

1978

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth

one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old

cure for fever or melancholy a tonic

for living on this earth  in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:

she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness

her body bombarded for years  by the element

she had purified

It seems she denied to the end

the source of the cataracts on her eyes

the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends

till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds came from the same source as her power

1974

Hunger

—for Audre Lorde

1.

A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent,

intimacy rigged with terrors,

a sequence of blurs the Chinese painter’s ink-stick planned,

a scene of desolation comforted

by two human figures recklessly exposed,

leaning together in a sticklike boat

in the foreground. Maybe we look like this,

I don’t know. I’m wondering

whether we even have what we think we have—

lighted windows signifying shelter,

a film of domesticity

over fragile roofs. I know I’m partly somewhere else—

huts strung across a drought-stretched land

not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother

watching my children shrink with hunger.

I live in my Western skin,

my Western vision, torn

and flung to what I can’t control or even fathom.

Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.

2.

They cán rule the world while they can persuade us

our pain belongs in some order.

Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,

than a life of famine and suicide, if a black lesbian dies,

if a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius

starves herself to feed others,

self-hatred battening on her body?

Something that kills us or leaves us half-alive

is raging under the name of an “act of god”

in Chad, in Niger, in the Upper Volta—

yes, that male god that acts on us and on our children,

that male State that acts on us and on our children

till our brains are blunted by malnutrition,

yet sharpened by the passion for survival,

our powers expended daily on the struggle

to hand a kind of life on to our children,

to change reality for our lovers

even in a single trembling drop of water.

3.

We can look at each other through both our lifetimes

like those two figures in the sticklike boat

flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;

even our intimacies are rigged with terror.

Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open,

I stand convicted by all my convictions—

you, too. We shrink from touching

our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves

and each other, we’re scared shitless

of what it could be to take and use our love,

hose it on a city, on a world,

to wield and guide its spray, destroying

poisons, parasites, rats, viruses—

like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.

4.

The decision to feed the world

is the real decision. No revolution

has chosen it. For that choice requires

that women shall be free.

I choke on the taste of bread in North America

but the taste of hunger in North America

is poisoning me. Yes, I’m alive to write these words,

to leaf through Kollwitz’s women

huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms

the “mothers” drained of milk, the “survivors” driven

to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision

bitter, concrete, and wordless.

I’m alive to want more than life,

want it for others starving and unborn,

to name the deprivations boring

into my will, my affections, into the brains

of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire

of terrorists of the mind.

In the black mirror of the subway window

hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.

Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,

a woman shields a dead child from the camera.

The passion to be inscribes her body.

Until we find each other, we are alone.

1974–1975

Cartographies of Silence

1.

A conversation begins

with a lie. And each

speaker of the so-called common language feels

the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against

a force of nature

A poem can begin

with a lie. And be torn up.

A conversation has other laws

recharges itself with its own

false energy. Cannot be torn

up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus

the isolation it denies.

2.

The classical music station

playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up

and again picking up the telephone

The syllables uttering

the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar

living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror

beneath the unsaid word

3.

The technology of silence

The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms

silence not absence

of words or music or even

raw sounds

Silence can be a plan

rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence

it has a history a form

Do not confuse it

with any kind of absence

4.

How calm, how inoffensive these words

begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger

Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you

there is enough pain here

This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays?

to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

5.

The silence that strips bare:

In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan

Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography

mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen

not as blank spaces or as words

stretched like a skin over meanings

but as silence falls at the end

of a night through which two people

have talked till dawn

6.

The scream

of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore

it asks itself

How dó I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you

I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them

This is useless to you and perhaps to others

7.

It was an old theme even for me:

Language cannot do everything—

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets

lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem

could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head

alight with dew

If it could simply look you in the face

with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing,

were finally clarified together in its stare

8.

No. Let me have this dust,

these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy

like the blind child’s fingers

or the newborn infant’s mouth

violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago

taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack

or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy

the pure annunciations to the eye

the visio beatifica

if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant

holding up a simple ear of grain

for return to the concrete and everlasting world

what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, conversations

from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

1975

Twenty-One Love Poems

I

Wherever in this city, screens flicker

with pornography, with science-fiction vampires,

victimized hirelings bending to the lash,

we also have to walk . . . if simply as we walk

through the rainsoaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties

of our own neighborhoods.

We need to grasp our lives inseparable

from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,

and the red begonia perilously flashing

from a tenement sill six stories high,

or the long-legged young girls playing ball

in the junior highschool playground.

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,

sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,

dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,

our animal passion rooted in the city.

II

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,

you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:

our friend the poet comes into my room

where I’ve been writing for days,

drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,

and I want to show her one poem

which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

and wake. You’ve kissed my hair

to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .

and I laugh and fall dreaming again

of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

to move openly together

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

III

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time

for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp

in time tells me we’re not young.

Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty,

my limbs streaming with a purer joy?

did I lean from any window over the city

listening for the future

as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring?

And you, you move toward me with the same tempo.

Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark

of the blue-eyed grass of early summer,

the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring.

At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever.

At forty-five, I want to know even our limits.

I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow,

and somehow, each of us will help the other live,

and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

IV

I come home from you through the early light of spring

flashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,

the Discount Wares, the shoe-store. . . . I’m lugging my sack

of groceries, I dash for the elevator

where a man, taut, elderly, carefully composed

lets the door almost close on me. —For god’s sake hold it!

I croak at him. —Hysterical,—he breathes my way.

I let myself into the kitchen, unload my bundles,

make coffee, open the window, put on Nina Simone

singing Here comes the sun. . . . I open the mail,

drinking delicious coffee, delicious music,

my body still both light and heavy with you. The mail

lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man

aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison:

My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display

they keep me constantly awake with the pain . . .

Do whatever you can to survive.

You know, I think that men love wars . . .

And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds

break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

V

This apartment full of books could crack open

to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes

of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face

the underside of everything you’ve loved—

the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag

even the best voices have had to mumble through,

the silence burying unwanted children—

women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.

Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books

so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;

yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift

loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,

Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,

and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries—

of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,

centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;

and we still have to stare into the absence

of men who would not, women who could not, speak

to our life—this still unexcavated hole

called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

VI

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—

only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands

I could trust the world, or in many hands like these,

handling power-tools or steering-wheel

or touching a human face. . . . Such hands could turn

the unborn child rightways in the birth canal

or pilot the exploratory rescue-ship

through icebergs, or piece together

the fine, needle-like sherds of a great krater-cup

bearing on its sides

figures of ecstatic women striding

to the sibyl’s den or the Eleusinian cave—

such hands might carry out an unavoidable violence

with such restraint, with such a grasp

of the range and limits of violence

that violence ever after would be obsolete.

VII

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

What atonement is this all about?

—and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.

Is all this close to the wolverines’ howled signals,

that modulated cantata of the wild?

or, when away from you I try to create you in words,

am I simply using you, like a river or a war?

And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars

to escape writing of the worst thing of all—

not the crimes of others, not even our own death,

but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough

so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem

mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?

VIII

I can see myself years back at Sunion,

hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes

in woman’s form, limping the long path,

lying on a headland over the dark sea,

looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl

of white told me a wave had struck,

imagining the pull of that water from that height,

knowing deliberate suicide wasn’t my métier,

yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound.

Well, that’s finished. The woman who cherished

her suffering is dead. I am her descendant.

I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,

but I want to go on from here with you

fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

IX

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.

It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,

even your face at another age.

Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—

a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,

a key. . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom

deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,

this inarticulate life. I’m waiting

for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water

for once, and show me what I can do

for you, who have often made the unnameable

nameable for others, even for me.

X

Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through

our cries, our murmured dawn conspiracies

our telephone calls. She knows—what can she know?

If in my human arrogance I claim to read

her eyes, I find there only my own animal thoughts:

that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort,

that voices of the psyche drive through the flesh

further than the dense brain could have foretold,

that the planetary nights are growing cold for those

on the same journey, who want to touch

one creature-traveler clear to the end;

that without tenderness, we are in hell.

XI

Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes,

making them eternally and visibly female.

No height without depth, without a burning core,

though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava.

I want to travel with you to every sacred mountain

smoking within like the sibyl stooped over his tripod,

I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path,

to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp,

never failing to note the small, jewel-like flower

unfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her,

that clings to the slowly altering rock—

that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves,

was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us.

XII

Sleeping, turning in turn like planets

rotating in their midnight meadow:

a touch is enough to let us know

we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:

the dream-ghosts of two worlds

walking their ghost-towns, almost address each other.

I’ve wakened to your muttered words

spoken light- or dark-years away

as if my own voice had spoken.

But we have different voices, even in sleep,

and our bodies, so alike, are yet so different

and the past echoing through our bloodstreams

is freighted with different language, different meanings—

though in any chronicle of the world we share

it could be written with new meaning

we were two lovers of one gender,

we were two women of one generation.

XIII

The rules break like a thermometer,

quicksilver spills across the charted systems,

we’re out in a country that has no language

no laws, we’re chasing the raven and the wren

through gorges unexplored since dawn

whatever we do together is pure invention

the maps they gave us were out of date

by years . . . we’re driving through the desert

wondering if the water will hold out

the hallucinations turn to simple villages

the music on the radio comes clear—

neither Rosenkavalier nor Götterdämmerung

but a woman’s voice singing old songs

with new words, with a quiet bass, a flute

plucked and fingered by women outside the law.

XIV

It was your vision of the pilot

confirmed my vision of you: you said, He keeps

on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose

while we crouched in the open hatchway

vomiting into plastic bags

for three hours between St. Pierre and Miquelon.

I never felt closer to you.

In the close cabin where the honeymoon couples

huddled in each other’s laps and arms

I put my hand on your thigh

to comfort both of us, your hand came over mine,

we stayed that way, suffering together

in our bodies, as if all suffering

were physical, we touched so in the presence

of strangers who knew nothing and cared less

vomiting their private pain

as if all suffering were physical.

(THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED)

Whatever happens with us, your body

will haunt mine—tender, delicate

your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond

of the fiddlehead fern in forests

just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs

between which my whole face has come and come—

the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—

the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—

your touch on me, firm, protective, searching

me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers

reaching where I had been waiting years for you

in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.

XV

If I lay on that beach with you

white, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Stream

and lying on that beach we could not stay

because the wind drove fine sand against us

as if it were against us

if we tried to withstand it and we failed—

if we drove to another place

to sleep in each other’s arms

and the beds were narrow like prisoners’ cots

and we were tired and did not sleep together

and this was what we found, so this is what we did—

was the failure ours?

If I cling to circumstances I could feel

not responsible. Only she who says

she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

XVI

Across a city from you, I’m with you,

just as an August night

moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,

the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table

cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight—

or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side

watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,

G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,

falling asleep to the music of the sea.

This island of Manhattan is wide enough

for both of us, and narrow:

I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face

lies upturned, the halflight tracing

your generous, delicate mouth

where grief and laughter sleep together.

XVII

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.

The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,

they happen in our lives like car crashes,

books that change us, neighborhoods

we move into and come to love.

Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,

women at least should know the difference

between love and death. No poison cup,

no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder

should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder

not merely played but should have listened to us,

and could instruct those after us:

this we were, this is how we tried to love,

and these are the forces they had ranged against us,

and these are the forces we had ranged within us,

within us and against us, against us and within us.

XVIII

Rain on the West Side Highway,

red light at Riverside:

the more I live the more I think

two people together is a miracle.

You’re telling the story of your life

for once, a tremor breaks the surface of your words.

The story of our lives becomes our lives.

Now you’re in fugue across what some I’m sure

Victorian poet called the salt estranging sea.

Those are the words that come to mind.

I feel estrangement, yes. As I’ve felt dawn

pushing toward daybreak. Something: a cleft of light—?

Close between grief and anger, a space opens

where I am Adrienne alone. And growing colder.

XIX

Can it be growing colder when I begin

to touch myself again, adhesions pull away?

When slowly the naked face turns from staring backward

and looks into the present,

the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and death

and the lips part and say: I mean to go on living?

Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dream

or in this poem, There are no miracles?

(I told you from the first I wanted daily life,

this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.)

If I could let you know—

two women together is a work

nothing in civilization has made simple,

two people together is a work

heroic in its ordinariness,

the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch

where the fiercest attention becomes routine

—look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

XX

That conversation we were always on the edge

of having, runs on in my head,

at night the Hudson trembles in New Jersey light

polluted water yet reflecting even

sometimes the moon

and I discern a woman

I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat

and choking her like hair. And this is she

with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head

turning aside from pain, is dragged down deeper

where it cannot hear me,

and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.

XXI

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones

of the great round rippled by stone implements

the midsummer night light rising from beneath

the horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”

I meant this. And this is not Stonehenge

simply nor any place but the mind

casting back to where her solitude,

shared, could be chosen without loneliness,

not easily nor without pains to stake out

the circle, the heavy shadows, the great light.

I choose to be a figure in that light,

half-blotted by darkness, something moving

across that space, the color of stone

greeting the moon, yet more than stone:

a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.

1974–1976

A Woman Dead in Her Forties

1.

Your breasts/ sliced-off The scars

dimmed as they would have to be

years later

All the women I grew up with are sitting

half-naked on rocks in sun

we look at each other and

are not ashamed

and you too have taken off your blouse

but this was not what you wanted:

to show your scarred, deleted torso

I barely glance at you

as if my look could scald you

though I’m the one who loved you

I want to touch my fingers

to where your breasts had been

but we never did such things

You hadn’t thought everyone

would look so perfect

unmutilated

you pull on

your blouse again: stern statement:

There are things I will not share

with everyone

2.

You send me back to share

my own scars first of all

with myself

What did I hide from her

what have I denied her

what losses suffered

how in this ignorant body

did she hide

waiting for her release

till uncontrollable light began to pour

from every wound and suture

and all the sacred openings

3.

Wartime. We sit on warm

weathered, softening grey boards

the ladder glimmers where you told me

the leeches swim

I smell the flame

of kerosene the pine

boards where we sleep side by side

in narrow cots

the night-meadow exhaling

its darkness calling

child into woman

child into woman

woman

4.

Most of our love from the age of nine

took the form of jokes and mute

loyalty: you fought a girl

who said she’d knock me down

we did each other’s homework

wrote letters kept in touch, untouching

lied about our lives: I wearing

the face of the proper marriage

you the face of the independent woman

We cleaved to each other across that space

fingering webs

of love and estrangement till the day

the gynecologist touched your breast

and found a palpable hardness

5.

You played heroic, necessary

games with death

since in your neo-protestant tribe the void

was supposed not to exist

except as a fashionable concept

you had no traffic with

I wish you were here tonight I want

to yell at you

Don’t accept

Don’t give in

But would I be meaning your brave

irreproachable life, you dean of women, or

your unfair, unfashionable, unforgivable

woman’s death?

6.

You are every woman I ever loved

and disavowed

a bloody incandescent chord strung out

across years, tracts of space

How can I reconcile this passion

with our modesty

your calvinist heritage

my girlhood frozen into forms

how can I go on this mission

without you

you, who might have told me

everything you feel is true?

7.

Time after time in dreams you rise

reproachful

once from a wheelchair pushed by your father

across a lethal expressway

Of all my dead it’s you

who come to me unfinished

You left me amber beads

strung with turquoise from an Egyptian grave

I wear them wondering

How am I true to you?

I’m half-afraid to write poetry

for you who never read it much

and I’m left laboring

with the secrets and the silence

in plain language: I never told you how I loved you

we never talked at your deathbed of your death

8.

One autumn evening in a train

catching the diamond-flash of sunset

in puddles along the Hudson

I thought: I understand

life and death now, the choices

I didn’t know your choice

or how by then you had no choice

how the body tells the truth in its rush of cells

Most of our love took the form

of mute loyalty

we never spoke at your deathbed of your death

but from here on

I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening

We stayed mute and disloyal

because we were afraid

I would have touched my fingers

to where your breasts had been

but we never did such things

1974–1977

Natural Resources

1.

The core of the strong hill: not understood:

the mulch-heat of the underwood

where unforeseen the forest fire unfurls;

the heat, the privacy of the mines;

the rainbow laboring to extend herself

where neither men nor cattle understand,

arching her lusters over rut and stubble

purely to reach where she must go;

the emerald lying against the silver vein

waiting for light to reach it, breathing in pain;

the miner laboring beneath

the ray of the headlamp: a weight like death.

2.

The miner is no metaphor. She goes

into the cage like the rest, is flung

downward by gravity like them, must change

her body like the rest to fit a crevice

to work a lode

on her the pick hangs heavy, the bad air

lies thick, the mountain presses in on her

with boulder, timber, fog

slowly the mountain’s dust descends

into the fibers of her lungs.

3.

The cage drops into the dark,

the routine of life goes on:

a woman turns a doorknob, but so slowly

so quietly, that no one wakes

and it is she alone who gazes

into the dark of bedrooms, ascertains

how they sleep, who needs her touch

what window blows the ice of February

into the room and who must be protected:

It is only she who sees; who was trained to see.

4.

Could you imagine a world of women only,

the interviewer asked. Can you imagine

a world where women are absent. (He believed

he was joking.) Yet I have to imagine

at one and the same moment, both. Because

I live in both. Can you imagine,

the interviewer asked, a world of men?

(He thought he was joking.) If so, then,

a world where men are absent?

Absently, wearily, I answered: Yes.

5.

The phantom of the man-who-would-understand,

the lost brother, the twin—

for him did we leave our mothers,

deny our sisters, over and over?

did we invent him, conjure him

over the charring log,

nights, late, in the snowbound cabin

did we dream or scry his face

in the liquid embers,

the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?

6.

It was never the rapist:

it was the brother, lost,

the comrade/twin whose palm

would bear a lifeline like our own:

decisive, arrowy,

forked-lightning of insatiate desire

It was never the crude pestle, the blind

ramrod we were after:

merely a fellow-creature

with natural resources equal to our own

7.

Meanwhile, another kind of being

was constructing itself, blindly

—a mutant, some have said:

the blood-compelled exemplar

of a “botched civilization”

as one of them called it

children picking up guns

for that is what it means to be a man

We have lived with violence for seven years

It was not worth one single life—

but the patriot’s fist is at her throat,

her voice is in mortal danger

and that kind of being has lain in our beds

declaring itself our desire

requiring women’s blood for life

a woman’s breast to lay its nightmare on

8.

And that kind of being has other forms:

a passivity we mistake

—in the desperation of our search—

for gentleness

But gentleness is active

gentleness swabs the crusted stump

invents more merciful instruments

to touch the wound beyond the wound.

does not faint with disgust

will not be driven off

keeps bearing witness calmly

against the predator, the parasite

9.

I am tired of faintheartedness,

their having to be exceptional

to do what an ordinary woman

does in the course of things

I am tired of women stooping to half our height

to bring the essential vein to light

tired of the waste of what we bear

with such cost, such elation, into sight

(—for what becomes of what the miner probes

and carves from the mountain’s body in her pain?)

10.

This is what I am: watching the spider

rebuild—“patiently”, they say,

but I recognize in her

impatience—my own—

the passion to make and make again

where such unmaking reigns

the refusal to be a victim

we have lived with violence so long

Am I to go on saying

for myself, for her

This is my body,

take and destroy it?

11.

The enormity of the simplest things:

in this cold barn tables are spread

with china saucers, shoehorns

of german silver, a gilt-edged book

that opens into a picture-frame—

a biscuit-tin of the thirties.

Outside, the north lies vast

with unshed snow, everything is

at once remote and familiar

each house contains what it must

women simmer carcasses

of clean-picked turkeys, store away

the cleaned cutglass and soak the linen cloths

Dark rushes early at the panes

12.

These things by women saved

are all we have of them

or of those dear to them

these ribboned letters, snapshots

faithfully glued for years

onto the scrapbook page

these scraps, turned into patchwork,

doll-gowns, clean white rags

for stanching blood

the bride’s tea-yellow handkerchief

the child’s height penciled on the cellar door

In this cold barn we dream

a universe of humble things—

and without these, no memory

no faithfulness, no purpose for the future

no honor to the past

13.

There are words I cannot choose again:

humanism androgyny

Such words have no shame in them, no diffidence

before the raging stoic grandmothers:

their glint is too shallow, like a dye

that does not permeate

the fibers of actual life

as we live it, now:

this fraying blanket with its ancient stains

we pull across the sick child’s shoulder

or wrap around the senseless legs

of the hero trained to kill

this weaving, ragged because incomplete

we turn our hands to, interrupted

over and over, handed down

unfinished, found in the drawer

of an old dresser in the barn,

her vanished pride and care

still urging us, urging on

our works, to close the gap

in the Great Nebula,

to help the earth deliver.

14.

The women who first knew themselves

miners, are dead. The rainbow flies

like a flying buttress from the walls

of cloud, the silver-and-green vein

awaits the battering of the pick

the dark lode weeps for light

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:

so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those

who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,

reconstitute the world.

1977

From

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far

1981

Integrity

the quality or state of being complete; unbroken

condition; entirety

—Webster

A wild patience has taken me this far

as if I had to bring to shore

a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor

old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books

tossed in the prow

some kind of sun burning my shoulder-blades.

Splashing the oarlocks. Burning through.

Your fore-arms can get scalded, licked with pain

in a sun blotted like unspoken anger

behind a casual mist.

The length of daylight

this far north, in this

forty-ninth year of my life

is critical.

The light is critical: of me, of this

long-dreamed, involuntary landing

on the arm of an inland sea.

The glitter of the shoal

depleting into shadow

I recognize: the stand of pines

violet-black really, green in the old postcard

but really I have nothing but myself

to go by; nothing

stands in the realm of pure necessity

except what my hands can hold.

Nothing but myself? . . . My selves.

After so long, this answer.

As if I had always known

I steer the boat in, simply.

The motor dying on the pebbles

cicadas taking up the hum

dropped in the silence.

Anger and tenderness: my selves.

And now I can believe they breathe in me

as angels, not polarities.

Anger and tenderness: the spider’s genius

to spin and weave in the same action

from her own body, anywhere—

even from a broken web.

The cabin in the stand of pines

is still for sale. I know this. Know the print

of the last foot, the hand that slammed and locked that door,

then stopped to wreathe the rain-smashed clematis

back on the trellis

for no one’s sake except its own.

I know the chart nailed to the wallboards

the icy kettle squatting on the burner.

The hands that hammered in those nails

emptied that kettle one last time

are these two hands

and they have caught the baby leaping

from between trembling legs

and they have worked the vacuum aspirator

and stroked the sweated temples

and steered the boat here through this hot

mistblotted sunlight, critical light

imperceptibly scalding

the skin these hands will also salve.

1978

For Memory

Old words: trust fidelity

Nothing new yet to take their place.

I rake leaves, clear the lawn, October grass

painfully green beneath the gold

and in this silent labor thoughts of you

start up

I hear your voice: disloyalty betrayal

stinging the wires

I stuff the old leaves into sacks

and still they fall and still

I see my work undone

One shivering rainswept afternoon

and the whole job to be done over

I can’t know what you know

unless you tell me

there are gashes in our understandings

of this world

We came together in a common

fury of direction

barely mentioning difference

(what drew our finest hairs

to fire

the deep, difficult troughs

unvoiced)

I fell through a basement railing

the first day of school and cut my forehead open—

did I ever tell you? More than forty years

and I still remember smelling my own blood

like the smell of a new schoolbook

And did you ever tell me

how your mother called you in from play

and from whom? To what? These atoms filmed by ordinary dust

that common life we each and all bent out of orbit from

to which we must return simply to say

this is where I came from

this is what I knew

The past is not a husk yet change goes on

Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out

under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers

of light, the fields of dark—

freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine

remembering. Putting together, inch by inch

the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

1979

For Ethel Rosenberg

Convicted, with her husband,

of “conspiracy to commit

espionage”; killed in the

electric chair June 19, 1953

1.

Europe 1953:

throughout my random sleepwalk

the words

scratched on walls, on pavements

painted over railway arches

Liberez les Rosenberg!

Escaping from home I found

home everywhere:

the Jewish question, Communism

marriage itself

a question of loyalty

or punishment

my Jewish father writing me

letters of seventeen pages

finely inscribed harangues

questions of loyalty

and punishment

One week before my wedding

that couple gets the chair

the volts grapple her, don’t

kill her fast enough

Liberez les Rosenberg!

I hadn’t realized

our family arguments were so important

my narrow understanding

of crime of punishment

no language for this torment

mystery of that marriage

always both faces

on every front page in the world

Something so shocking so

unfathomable

it must be pushed aside

2.

She sank however into my soul A weight of sadness

I hardly can register how deep

her memory has sunk that wife and mother

like so many

who seemed to get nothing out of any of it

except her children

that daughter of a family

like so many

needing its female monster

she, actually wishing to be an artist

wanting out of poverty

possibly also really wanting

revolution

that woman strapped in the chair

no fear and no regrets

charged by posterity

not with selling secrets to the Communists

but with wanting to distinguish

herself being a bad daughter a bad mother

And I walking to my wedding

by the same token a bad daughter a bad sister

my forces focussed

on that hardly revolutionary effort

Her life and death the possible

ranges of disloyalty

so painful so unfathomable

they must be pushed aside

ignored for years

3.

Her mother testifies against her

Her brother testifies against her

After her death

she becomes a natural prey for pornographers

her death itself a scene

her body sizzling half-strapped whipped like a sail

She becomes the extremest victim

described nonetheless as rigid of will

what are her politics by then no one knows

Her figure sinks into my soul

a drowned statue

sealed in lead

For years it has lain there unabsorbed

first as part of that dead couple

on the front pages of the world the week

I gave myself in marriage

then slowly severing drifting apart

a separate death a life unto itself

no longer the Rosenbergs

no longer the chosen scapegoat

the family monster

till I hear how she sang

a prostitute to sleep

in the Women’s House of Detention

Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg would you

have marched to take back the night

collected signatures

for battered women who kill

What would you have to tell us

would you have burst the net

4.

Why do I even want to call her up

to console my pain (she feels no pain at all)

why do I wish to put such questions

to ease myself (she feels no pain at all

she finally burned to death like so many)

why all this exercise of hindsight?

since if I imagine her at all

I have to imagine first

the pain inflicted on her by women

her mother testifies against her

her sister-in-law testifies against her

and how she sees it

not the impersonal forces

not the historical reasons

why they might have hated her strength

If I have held her at arm’s length till now

if I have still believed it was

my loyalty, my punishment at stake

if I dare imagine her surviving

I must be fair to what she must have lived through

I must allow her to be at last

political in her ways not in mine

her urgencies perhaps impervious to mine

defining revolution as she defines it

or, bored to the marrow of her bones

with “politics”

bored with the vast boredom of long pain

small; tiny in fact; in her late sixties

liking her room her private life

living alone perhaps

no one you could interview

maybe filling a notebook herself

with secrets she has never sold

1980

Grandmothers

1. Mary Gravely Jones

We had no petnames, no diminutives for you,

always the formal guest under my father’s roof:

you were “Grandmother Jones” and you visited rarely.

I see you walking up and down the garden,

restless, southern-accented, reserved, you did not seem

my mother’s mother or anyone’s grandmother.

You were Mary, widow of William, and no matriarch,

yet smoldering to the end with frustrate life,

ideas nobody listened to, least of all my father.

One summer night you sat with my sister and me

in the wooden glider long after twilight,

holding us there with streams of pent-up words.

You could quote every poet I had ever heard of,

had read The Opium Eater, Amiel and Bernard Shaw,

your green eyes looked clenched against opposition.

You married straight out of the convent school,

your background was country, you left an unperformed

typescript of a play about Burr and Hamilton,

you were impotent and brilliant, no one cared

about your mind, you might have ended

elsewhere than in that glider

reciting your unwritten novels to the children.

2. Hattie Rice Rich

Your sweetness of soul was a mystery to me,

you who slip-covered chairs, glued broken china,

lived out of a wardrobe trunk in our guestroom

summer and fall, then took the Pullman train

in your darkblue dress and straw hat, to Alabama,

shuttling half-yearly between your son and daughter.

Your sweetness of soul was a convenience for everyone,

how you rose with the birds and children, boiled your own egg,

fished for hours on a pier, your umbrella spread,

took the street-car downtown shopping

endlessly for your son’s whims, the whims of genius,

kept your accounts in ledgers, wrote letters daily.

All through World War Two the forbidden word

Jewish was barely uttered in your son’s house;

your anger flared over inscrutable things.

Once I saw you crouched on the guestroom bed,

knuckles blue-white around the bedpost, sobbing

your one brief memorable scene of rebellion:

you didn’t want to go back South that year.

You were never “Grandmother Rich” but “Anana”;

you had money of your own but you were homeless,

Hattie, widow of Samuel, and no matriarch,

dispersed among the children and grandchildren.

3. Granddaughter

Easier to encapsulate your lives

in a slide-show of impressions given and taken,

to play the child or victim, the projectionist,

easier to invent a script for each of you,

myself still at the center,

than to write words in which you might have found

yourselves, looked up at me and said

“Yes, I was like that; but I was something more. . . .”

Danville, Virginia; Vicksburg, Mississippi;

the “war between the states” a living memory

its aftermath the plague-town closing

its gates, trying to cure itself with poisons.

I can almost touch that little town. . . .

a little white town rimmed with Negroes,

making a deep shadow on the whiteness.

Born a white woman, Jewish or of curious mind

—twice an outsider, still believing in inclusion—

in those defended hamlets of half-truth

broken in two by one strange idea,

“blood” the all-powerful, awful theme—

what were the lessons to be learned? If I believe

the daughter of one of you—Amnesia was the answer.

1980

The Spirit of Place

—for Michelle Cliff

I.

Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett

driving with you in spring  road

like a streambed unwinding downhill

fiddlehead ferns uncurling

spring peepers ringing sweet and cold

while we talk yet again

of dark and light, of blackness, whiteness, numbness

rammed through the heart like a stake

trying to pull apart the threads

from the dried blood of the old murderous uncaring

halting on bridges in bloodlight

where the freshets call out freedom

to frog-thrilling swamp, skunk-cabbage

trying to sense the conscience of these hills

knowing how the single-minded, pure

solutions bleached and dessicated

within their perfect flasks

for it was not enough to be New England

as every event since has testified:

New England’s a shadow-country, always was

it was not enough to be for abolition

while the spirit of the masters

flickered in the abolitionist’s heart

it was not enough to name ourselves anew

while the spirit of the masters

calls the freedwoman to forget the slave

With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

If there’s a conscience in these hills

it hurls that question

unquenched, relentless, to our ears

wild and witchlike

ringing every swamp

II.

The mountain laurel in bloom

constructed like needlework

tiny half-pulled stitches piercing

flushed and stippled petals

here in these woods it grows wild

midsummer moonrise turns it opal

the night breathes with its clusters

protected species

meaning endangered

Here in these hills

this valley we have felt

a kind of freedom

planting the soil have known

hours of a calm, intense and mutual solitude

reading and writing

trying to clarify connect

past and present near and far

the Alabama quilt

the Botswana basket

history the dark crumble

of last year’s compost

filtering softly through your living hand

but here as well we face

instantaneous violence ambush male

dominion on a back road

to escape in a locked car windows shut

skimming the ditch your split-second

survival reflex taking on the world

as it is not as we wish it

as it is not as we work for it

to be

III.

Strangers are an endangered species

In Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst

cocktails are served the scholars

gather in celebration

their pious or clinical legends

festoon the walls like imitations

of period patterns

(. . . and, as I feared, my “life” was made a “victim”)

The remnants pawed  the relics

the cult assembled in the bedroom

and you whose teeth were set on edge by churches

resist your shrine

escape

are found

nowhere

unless in words

(your own)

All we are strangers—dear—The world is not

acquainted with us, because we are not acquainted

with her. And Pilgrims!—Do you hesitate? and

Soldiers oft—some of us victors, but those I do

not see tonight owing to the smoke.—We are hungry,

and thirsty, sometimes—We are barefoot—and cold—

This place is large enough for both of us

the river-fog will do for privacy

this is my third and last address to you

with the hands of a daughter I would cover you

from all intrusion even my own

saying rest to your ghost

with the hands of a sister I would leave your hands

open or closed as they prefer to lie

and ask no more of who or why or wherefore

with the hands of a mother I would close the door

on the rooms you’ve left behind

and silently pick up my fallen work

IV.

The river-fog will do for privacy

on the low road a breath

here, there, a cloudiness floating on the blacktop

sunflower heads turned black and bowed

the seas of corn a stubble

the old routes flowing north, if not to freedom

no human figure now in sight

(with whom do you believe your lot is cast?)

only the functional figure of the scarecrow

the cut corn, ground to shreds, heaped in a shape

like an Indian burial mound

a haunted-looking, ordinary thing

The work of winter starts fermenting in my head

how with the hands of a lover or a midwife

to hold back till the time is right

force nothing, be unforced

accept no giant miracles of growth

by counterfeit light

trust roots, allow the days to shrink

give credence to these slender means

wait without sadness and with grave impatience

here in the north where winter has a meaning

where the heaped colors suddenly go ashen

where nothing is promised

learn what an underground journey

has been, might have to be; speak in a winter code

let fog, sleet, translate; wind, carry them.

V.

Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

over the Mohawk Trail a parallelogram

slashed with two cuts of steel

A night so clear that every constellation

stands out from an undifferentiated cloud

of stars, a kind of aura

All the figures up there look violent to me

as a pogrom on Christmas Eve in some old country

I want our own earth not the satellites, our

world as it is if not as it might be

then as it is: male dominion, gangrape, lynching, pogrom

the Mohawk wraiths in their tracts of leafless birch

watching: will we do better?

The tests I need to pass are prescribed by the spirits

of place who understand travel but not amnesia

The world as it is: not as her users boast

damaged beyond reclamation by their using

Ourselves as we are in these painful motions

of staying cognizant: some part of us always

out beyond ourselves

knowing knowing knowing

Are we all in training for something we don’t name?

to exact reparation for things

done long ago to us and to those who did not

survive what was done to them whom we ought to honor

with grief with fury with action

On a pure night on a night when pollution

seems absurdity when the undamaged planet seems to turn

like a bowl of crystal in black ether

they are the piece of us that lies out there

knowing knowing knowing

1980

Frame

Winter twilight. She comes out of the lab-

oratory, last class of the day

a pile of notebooks slung in her knapsack, coat

zipped high against the already swirling

evening sleet. The wind is wicked and the

busses slower than usual. On her mind

is organic chemistry and the issue

of next month’s rent and will it be possible to

bypass the professor with the coldest eyes

to get a reference for graduate school,

and whether any of them, even those who smile

can see, looking at her, a biochemist

or a marine biologist, which of the faces

can she trust to see her at all, either today

or in any future. The busses are worm-slow in the

quickly gathering dark. I don’t know her. I am

standing though somewhere just outside the frame

of all this, trying to see. At her back

the newly finished building suddenly looks

like shelter, it has glass doors, lighted halls

presumably heat. The wind is wicked. She throws a

glance down the street, sees no bus coming and runs

up the newly constructed steps into the newly

constructed hallway. I am standing all this time

just beyond the frame, trying to see. She runs

her hand through the crystals of sleet about to melt

on her hair. She shifts the weight of the books

on her back. It isn’t warm here exactly but it’s

out of that wind. Through the glass

door panels she can watch for the bus through the thickening

weather. Watching so, she is not

watching for the white man who watches the building

who has been watching her. This is Boston 1979.

I am standing somewhere at the edge of the frame

watching the man, we are both white, who watches the building

telling her to move on, get out of the hallway.

I can hear nothing because I am not supposed to be

present but I can see her gesturing

out toward the street at the wind-raked curb

I see her drawing her small body up

against the implied charges. The man

goes away. Her body is different now.

It is holding together with more than a hint of fury

and more than a hint of fear. She is smaller, thinner

more fragile-looking than I am. But I am not supposed to be

there. I am just outside the frame

of this action when the anonymous white man

returns with a white police officer. Then she starts

to leave into the windraked night but already

the policeman is going to work, the handcuffs are on her

wrists he is throwing her down his knee has gone into

her breast he is dragging her down the stairs I am unable

to hear a sound of all this all that I know is what

I can see from this position there is no soundtrack

to go with this and I understand at once

it is meant to be in silence that this happens

in silence that he pushes her into the car

banging her head in silence that she cries out

in silence that she tries to explain she was only

waiting for a bus

in silence that he twists the flesh of her thigh

with his nails in silence that her tears begin to flow

that she pleads with the other policeman as if

he could be trusted to see her at all

in silence that in the precinct she refuses to give her name

in silence that they throw her into the cell

in silence that she stares him

straight in the face in silence that he sprays her

in her eyes with Mace in silence that she sinks her teeth

into his hand in silence that she is charged

with trespass assault and battery in

silence that at the sleet-swept corner her bus

passes without stopping and goes on

in silence. What I am telling you

is told by a white woman who they will say

was never there. I say I am there.

1980

From

Your Native Land,

Your Life

1986

For the Record

The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war

the brooks gave no information

if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river

it was not taking sides

the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf

had no political opinions

and if here or there a house

filled with backed-up raw sewage

or poisoned those who lived there

with slow fumes, over years

the houses were not at war

nor did the tinned-up buildings

intend to refuse shelter

to homeless old women and roaming children

they had no policy to keep them roaming

or dying, no, the cities were not the problem

the bridges were non-partisan

the freeways burned, but not with hatred

Even the miles of barbed-wire

stretched around crouching temporary huts

designed to keep the unwanted

at a safe distance, out of sight

even the boards that had to absorb

year upon year, so many human sounds

so many depths of vomit, tears

slow-soaking blood

had not offered themselves for this

The trees didn’t volunteer to be cut into boards

nor the thorns for tearing flesh

Look around at all of it

and ask whose signature

is stamped on the orders, traced

in the corner of the building plans

Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied

women were, the drunks and crazies,

the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were

1983

Virginia 1906

A white woman dreaming of innocence,

of a country childhood, apple-blossom driftings,

is held in a DC-10 above the purity

of a thick cloud ceiling in a vault of purest blue.

She feels safe. Here, no one can reach her.

Neither men nor women have her in their power.

Because I have sometimes been her, because I am of her,

I watch her with eyes that blink away like a flash

cruelly, when she does what I don’t want to see.

I am tired of innocence and its uselessness,

sometimes the dream of innocence beguiles me.

Nothing has told me how to think of her power.

Blurredly, apple-blossom drifts

across rough earth, small trees contort and twist

making their own shapes, wild. Why should we love purity?

Can the woman in the DC-10 see this

and would she call this innocence? If no one can reach her

she is drawing on unnamed, unaccountable power.

This woman I have been and recognize

must know that beneath the quilt of whiteness lies

a hated nation, hers,

earth whose wet places call to mind

still-open wounds:  her country.

Do we love purity? Where do we turn for power?

Knowing us as I do I cringe when she says

But I was not culpable,

I was the victim, the girl, the youngest,

the susceptible one, I was sick,

the one who simply had to get out, and did

: I am still trying how to think of her power.

And if she was forced, this woman, by the same

white Dixie boy who took for granted as prey

her ignored dark sisters?  What if at five years old

she was old to his fingers splaying her vulva open

what if forever after, in every record

she wants her name inscribed as innocent

and will not speak, refuses to know, can say

I have been numb for years

does not want to hear of any violation

like or unlike her own, as if the victim

can be innocent only in isolation

as if the victim dare not be intelligent

(I have been numb for years): and if this woman

longs for an intact world, an intact soul,

longs for what we all long for, yet denies us all?

What has she smelled of power without once

tasting it in the mouth? For what protections

has she traded her wildness and the lives of others?

There is a porch in Salem, Virginia

that I have never seen, that may no longer stand,

honeysuckle vines twisting above the talk,

a driveway full of wheeltracks, paths going down

to the orchards, apple and peach,

divisions so deep a wild child lost her way.

A child climbing an apple-tree in Virginia

refuses to come down, at last comes down

for a neighbor’s lying bribe. Now, if that child, grown old

feels safe in a DC-10 to above thick white clouds

and no one can reach her

and if that woman’s child, another woman

chooses another way, yet finds the old vines

twisting across her path, the old wheeltracks

how does she stop dreaming the dream

of protection, how does she follow her own wildness

shedding the innocence, the childish power?

How does she keep from dreaming the old dreams?

1983

For an Occupant

Did the fox speak to you?

Did the small brush-fires on the hillside

smoke her out?

Were you standing on the porch

not the kitchen porch  the front

one of poured concrete  full in the rising moon

and did she appear  wholly on her own

asking no quarter  wandering by

on impulse  up the drive  and on

into the pine-woods

but were you standing there

at the moment of moon and burnished light

leading your own life  till she caught your eye

asking no charity

but did she speak to you?

1983

North American Time

I

When my dreams showed signs

of becoming

politically correct

no unruly images

escaping beyond borders

when walking in the street I found my

themes cut out for me

knew what I would not report

for fear of enemies’ usage

then I began to wonder

II

Everything we write

will be used against us

or against those we love.

These are the terms,

take them or leave them.

Poetry never stood a chance

of standing outside history.

One line typed twenty years ago

can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint

to glorify art as detachment

or torture of those we

did not love but also

did not want to kill

We move but our words stand

become responsible

for more than we intended

and this is verbal privilege

III

Try sitting at a typewriter

one calm summer evening

at a table by a window

in the country, try pretending

your time does not exist

that you are simply you

that the imagination simply strays

like a great moth, unintentional

try telling yourself

you are not accountable

to the life of your tribe

the breath of your planet

IV

It doesn’t matter what you think.

Words are found responsible

all you can do is choose them

or choose

to remain silent. Or, you never had a choice,

which is why the words that do stand

are responsible

and this is verbal privilege

V

Suppose you want to write

of a woman braiding

another woman’s hair—

straight down, or with beads and shells

in three-strand plaits or corn-rows—

you had better know the thickness

the length the pattern

why she decides to braid her hair

how it is done to her

what country it happens in

what else happens in that country

You have to know these things

VI

Poet, sister: words—

whether we like it or not—

stand in a time of their own.

No use protesting I wrote that

before Kollontai was exiled

Rosa Luxemburg, Malcolm,

Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,

before Treblinka, Birkenau,

Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,

Biafra, Bangla Desh, Boston,

Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam

—those faces, names of places

sheared from the almanac

of North American time

VII

I am thinking this in a country

where words are stolen out of mouths

as bread is stolen out of mouths

where poets don’t go to jail

for being poets, but for being

dark-skinned, female, poor.

I am writing this in a time

when anything we write

can be used against those we love

where the context is never given

though we try to explain, over and over

For the sake of poetry at least

I need to know these things

VIII

Sometimes, gliding at night

in a plane over New York City

I have felt like some messenger

called to enter, called to engage

this field of light and darkness.

A grandiose idea, born of flying.

But underneath the grandiose idea

is the thought that what I must engage

after the plane has raged onto the tarmac

after climbing my old stairs, sitting down

at my old window

is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.

IX

In North America time stumbles on

without moving, only releasing

a certain North American pain.

Julia de Burgos wrote:

That my grandfather was a slave

is my grief; had he been a master

that would have been my shame.

A poet’s words, hung over a door

in North America, in the year

nineteen-eighty-three.

The almost-full moon rises

timelessly speaking of change

out of the Bronx, the Harlem River

the drowned towns of the Quabbin

the pilfered burial mounds

the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds

and I start to speak again.

1983

Blue Rock

For Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz

Your chunk of lapis-lazuli shoots its stain

blue into the wineglass on the table

the full moon moving up the sky is plain

as the dead rose and the live buds on one stem

No, this isn’t Persian poetry I’m quoting:

all this is here in North America

where I sit trying to kindle fire

from what’s already on fire:

the light of a blue rock from Chile swimming

in the apricot liquid called “eye of the swan”.

This is a chunk of your world, a piece of its heart:

split from the rest, does it suffer?

You needn’t tell me. Sometimes I hear it singing

by the waters of Babylon, in a strange land

sometimes it just lies heavy in my hand

with the heaviness of silent seismic knowledge

a blue rock in a foreign land, an exile

excised but never separated

from the gashed heart, its mountains,

winter rains, language, native sorrow.

At the end of the twentieth century

cardiac graphs of torture reply to poetry

line by line:   in North America

the strokes of the stylus continue

the figures of terror are reinvented

all night, after I turn the lamp off, blotting

wineglass, rock and roses, leaving pages

like this scrawled with mistakes and love,

falling asleep; but the stylus does not sleep,

cruelly the drum revolves, cruelty writes its name.

Once when I wrote poems they did not change

left overnight on the page

they stayed as they were and daylight broke

on the lines, as on the clotheslines in the yard

heavy with clothes forgotten or left out

for a better sun next day

But now I know what happens while I sleep

and when I wake the poem has changed:

the facts have dilated it, or cancelled it;

and in every morning’s light, your rock is there.

1985

from Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1.

Look:  this is January  the worst onslaught

is ahead of us  Don’t be lured

by these soft grey afternoons  these sunsets cut

from pink and violet tissue-paper  by the thought

the days are lengthening

Don’t let the solstice fool you:

our lives will always be

a stew of contradictions

the worst moment of winter can come in April

when the peepers are stubbornly still  and our bodies

plod on without conviction

and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer

arsenal of everything that tries us:

this battering, blunt-edged life

2.

Heart of cold. Bones of cold. Scalp of cold.

the grey  the black  the blond  the red

hairs on a skull of cold.  Within that skull

the thought of war  the sovereign thought

the coldest of all thought. Dreaming shut down

everything kneeling down to cold  intelligence

smirking with cold  memory

squashed and frozen cold  breath

half held-in for cold.  The freezing people

of a freezing nation  eating

luxury food or garbage

frozen tongues licking the luxury meat

or the pizza-crust  the frozen eyes

welded to other eyes also frozen

the cold hands trying to stroke  the coldest sex.

Heart of cold  Sex of cold  Intelligence of cold

My country  wedged fast in history

stuck in the ice

3.

My mouth hovers across your breasts

in the short grey winter afternoon

in this bed  we are delicate

and tough  so hot with joy we amaze ourselves

tough  and delicate  we play rings

around each other  our daytime candle burns

with its peculiar light  and if the snow

begins to fall outside  filling the branches

and if the night falls  without announcement

these are the pleasures of winter

sudden, wild and delicate  your fingers

exact  my tongue exact at the same moment

stopping to laugh at a joke

my love  hot on your scent  on the cusp of winter

6.

Dear Adrienne:

I’m calling you up tonight

as I might call up a friend  as I might call up a ghost

to ask what you intend to do

with the rest of your life. Sometimes you act

as if you have all the time there is.

I worry about you when I see this.

The prime of life, old age

aren’t what they used to be;

making a good death isn’t either,

now you can walk around the corner of a wall

and see a light

that already has blown your past away.

Somewhere in Boston  beautiful literature

is being read around the clock

by writers  to signify

their dislike of this.

I hope you’ve got something in mind.

I hope you have some idea

about the rest of your life.

In sisterhood,

Adrienne

7.

Dear Adrienne,

I feel signified by pain

from my breastbone through my left shoulder down

through my elbow into my wrist is a thread of pain

I am typing this instead of writing by hand

because my wrist on the right side

blooms and rushes with pain

like a neon bulb

You ask me how I’m going to live

the rest of my life

Well, nothing is predictable with pain

Did the old poets write of this?

—in its odd spaces, free,

many have sung and battled—

But I’m already living the rest of my life

not under conditions of my choosing

wired  into pain

rider on the slow train

Yours, Adrienne

10.

Night  over the great and the little worlds

of Brooklyn  the shredded communities

in Chicago  Argentina  Poland

in Holyoke Massachusetts  Amsterdam  Manchester

England

Night falls  the day of atonement begins

in how many divided hearts  how many defiant lives

Toronto  Managua  St. Johnsbury

and the great and little worlds of the women

Something ancient passes across the earth

lifting the dust of the blasted ghettos

You ask if I will eat and I say, Yes,

I have never fasted

but something crosses my life

not a shadow  the reflection of a fire

11.

I came out of the hospital like a woman

who’d watched a massacre

not knowing how to tell

my adhesions  the lingering infections

from the pain on the streets

In my room on Yom Kippur they took me off morphine

I saw shadows on the wall  the dying and the dead

They said Christian Phalangists did it

then Kol Nidre on the radio  and my own

unhoused spirit  trying to find a home

Was it then or another day

in what order did it happen

I thought  They call this elective surgery

but we all have died of this.

12.

Violence as purification:  the one idea.

One massacre great enough to undo another

one last-ditch operation to solve the problem

of the old operation that was bungled

Look:  I have lain on their tables under their tools

under their drugs  from the center of my body

a voice bursts  against these methods

(wherever you made a mistake

batter with radiation  defoliate  cut away)

and yes, there are merciful debridements

but burns turn into rotting flesh

for reasons of vengeance and neglect.

I have been too close to septic too many times

to play with either violence or non-violence.

14.

Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences

meaningless in ordinary American

like, Your mother, too, was a missionary of poets

and in another dream one of my old teachers

shows me a letter of reference

he has written for me, in a language

I know to be English but cannot understand,

telling me it’s in “transformational grammar”

and that the student who typed the letter

does not understand this grammar either.

Lately I dreamed about my father,

how I found him, alive, seated on an old chair.

I think what he said to me was,

You don’t know how lonely I am.

15.

You who think I find words for everything,

and you for whom I write this,

how can I show you what I’m barely

coming into possession of, invisible luggage

of more than fifty years, looking at first

glance like everyone else’s, turning up

at the airport carousel

and the waiting for it, knowing what nobody

would steal must eventually come round—

feeling obsessed, peculiar, longing?

18.

The problem, unstated till now, is how

to live in a damaged body

in a world where pain is meant to be gagged

uncured  un-grieved-over  The problem is

to connect, without hysteria, the pain

of any one’s body with the pain of the body’s world

For it is the body’s world

they are trying to destroy forever

The best world is the body’s world

filled with creatures  filled with dread

misshapen so  yet the best we have

our raft among the abstract worlds

and how I longed to live on this earth

walking her boundaries  never counting the cost

20.

The tobacco fields lie fallow  the migrant pickers

no longer visible

where undocumented intelligences travailed

on earth they had no stake in

though the dark leaves growing beneath white veils

were beautiful  and the barns opened out like fans

All this of course could have been done differently

This valley itself:  one more contradiction

the paradise fields  the brute skyscrapers

the pesticidal wells

I have been wanting for years

to write a poem  equal to these

material forces

and I have always failed

I wasn’t looking for a muse

only a reader by whom  I could not be mistaken

22.

In a bald skull sits our friend  in a helmet

of third-degree burns

her quizzical melancholy grace

her irreplaceable self  in utter peril

In the radioactive desert walks a woman

in a black dress  white-haired  steady

as the luminous hand of a clock

in circles she walks  knitting

and unknitting her scabbed fingers

Her face is expressionless  shall we pray to her

shall we speak of the loose pine-needles  how they shook

like the pith of country summers

from the sacks of pitchblende ore in the tin-roofed shack

where it all began

Shall we accuse her of denial

first of the self  then of the mixed virtue

of the purest science  shall we be wise for her

in hindsight  shall we scream It has come to this

Shall we praise her  shall we let her wander

the atomic desert  in peace?

23.

You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,

the chemical industries  and pay

that hush-money to the men

who landed out there at twenty  not for belief

but because of who they were  and were called psychos

when they said their bodies contained dioxin

like memories they didn’t want to keep

whose kids came out deformed

You know nothing has changed  no respect or grief

for the losers of a lost war everyone hated

nobody sent them to school like heroes

if they started sueing for everything that was done

there would be no end  there would be a beginning

My country  wedged fast in history

stuck in the ice

26.

You:  air-driven  reft  from the tuber-bitten soil

that was your portion  from the torched-out village

the Marxist study-group  the Zionist cell

café or cheder  Zaddik or Freudian straight or gay

woman or man O you

stripped bared appalled

stretched to mere spirit yet still physical

your irreplaceable knowledge lost

at the mud-slick bottom of the world

how you held fast with your bone-meal fingers

to yourselves each other and strangers

how you touched held-up from falling

what was already half-cadaver

how your life-cry taunted extinction

with its wild, crude so what?

Grief for you has rebellion at its heart

it cannot simply mourn

You: air-driven: reft: are yet our teachers

trying to speak to us in sleep

trying to help us wake

27.

The Tolstoyans  the Afro-American slaves

knew this:  you could be killed

for teaching people to read and write

I used to think the worst affliction

was to be forbidden pencil and paper

well, Ding Ling recited poems to prison walls

for years of the Cultural Revolution

and truly, the magic of written characters

looms and dwindles  shrinks small  grows swollen

depending on where you stand

and what is in your hand

and who can read and why

I think now the worst affliction

is not to know who you are or have been

I have learned this in part

from writers  Reading and writing

aren’t sacred  yet people have been killed

as if they were

29.

You who think I find words for everything

this is enough for now

cut it short  cut loose from my words

You for whom I write this

in the night hours when the wrecked cartilage

sifts round the mystical jointure of the bones

when the insect of detritus crawls

from shoulder to elbow to wristbone

remember:  the body’s pain and the pain on the streets

are not the same  but you can learn

from the edges that blur  O you who love clear edges

more than anything  watch the edges that blur

1983–1985

From

Time’s Power

1989

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

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

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

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

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 pine’s 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

From

An Atlas of the Difficult World

1991

from An Atlas of the Difficult World

I

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

—a woman’s voice, a man’s voice or

voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast

past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires

THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes

dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand

in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist,

Malathion in the throat, communion,

the hospital at the edge of the fields,

prematures slipping from unsafe wombs,

the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching

planes dusting rows of pickers.

Elsewhere declarations are made: at the sink

rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from market

one says: “On the pond this evening is a light

finer than my mother’s handkerchief

received from her mother, hemmed and initialled

by the nuns in Belgium.”

One says: “I can lie for hours

reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard.

I’d rather lie awake and read.” One writes:

“Mosquitoes pour through the cracks

in this cabin’s walls, the road

in winter is often impassable,

I live here so I don’t have to go out and act,

I’m trying to hold onto my life, it feels like nothing.”

One says: “I never knew from one day to the next

where it was coming from: I had to make my life happen

from day to day. Every day an emergency.

Now I have a house, a job from year to year.

What does that make me?”

In the writing workshop a young man’s tears

wet the frugal beard he’s grown to go with his poems

hoping they have redemption stored

in their lines, maybe will get him home free. In the classroom

eight-year-old faces are grey. The teacher knows which children

have not broken fast that day,

remembers the Black Panthers spooning cereal.

I don’t want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake,

tore up her writing, threw the kerosene

lantern into her face waiting

like an unbearable mirror of his own. I don’t

want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer

how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck

and backed it into her. I don’t want to think

how her guesses betrayed her—that he meant well, that she

was really the stronger and ought not to leave him

to his own apparent devastation. I don’t want to know

wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials

and so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly

over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in

another season, light and music still pouring over

our fissured, cracked terrain.

Within two miles of the Pacific rounding

this long bay, sheening the light for miles

inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over

strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind

returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with

ever-changing words, always the same language

—this is where I live now. If you had known me

once, you’d still know me now though in a different

light and life. This is no place you ever knew me.

But it would not surprise you

to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean

eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always

I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth. What I love here

is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks

small canyons running through pitched hillsides

liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading

to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle

on their blond hills. I drive inland over roads

closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons

roads that crawl down into darkness and wind into light

where trucks have crashed and riders of horses tangled

to death with lowstruck boughs. These are not the roads

you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching

for life and death, is the same.

II

Here is a map of our country:

here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt

This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin

we dare not taste its water

This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms

This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms

This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy

This is the cemetery of the poor

who died for democracy This is a battlefield

from a nineteenth-century war the shrine is famous

This is the sea-town of myth and story when the fishing fleets

went bankrupt here is where the jobs were on the pier

processing frozen fishsticks hourly wages and no shares

These are other battlefields Centralia Detroit

here are the forests primeval the copper the silver lodes

These are the suburbs of acquiescence silence rising fumelike

from the streets

This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires

flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling

whose children are drifting blind alleys pent

between coiled rolls of razor wire

I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural

then yes let it be  these are small distinctions

where do we see it from is the question

IV

Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds

the map of this country together: the girasol, orange gold-

petalled

with her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to

California

runs the edges of orchards, chain-link fences

milo fields and malls, schoolyards and reservations

truckstops and quarries, grazing ranges, graveyards

of veterans, graveyards of cars hulked and sunk, her tubers the

jerusalem artichoke

that has fed the Indians, fed the hobos, could feed us all.

Is there anything in the soil, cross-country, that makes for

a plant so generous? Spendthrift we say, as if

accounting nature’s waste. Ours darkens

the states to their strict borders, flushes

down borderless streams, leaches from lakes to the curdled foam

down by the riverside.

Waste. Waste. The watcher’s eye put out, hands of the

builder severed, brain of the maker starved

those who could bind, join, reweave, cohere, replenish

now at risk in this segregate republic

locked away out of sight and hearing, out of mind, shunted aside

those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments

those urgently needed for the work of perception

work of the poet, the astronomer, the historian, the architect of

new streets

work of the speaker who also listens

meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate

woman, the desperate man

—never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair—it cannot

be done without them

and where are they now?

V

Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

where any calendar’s ripped-off: Appomattox

Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon

the ex-Army nurse hitch-hiking from the debriefing center; medal

of spit on the veteran’s shoulder

—catch if you can this unbound land these states without a cause

earth of despoiled graves and grazing these embittered brooks

these pilgrim ants pouring out from the bronze eyes, ears,

nostrils,

the mouth of Liberty

over the chained bay waters

San Quentin:

once we lost our way and drove in under the searchlights to the

gates

end of visiting hours, women piling into cars

the bleak glare aching over all

Where are we moored? What

are the bindings? What be-

hooves us?

Driving the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge

no monument’s in sight but fog

prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz

poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog

no icon lifts a lamp here

history’s breath blotting the air

over Gold Mountain a transfer

of patterns like the transfer of African appliqué

to rural Alabama voices alive in legends, curses

tongue-lashings

poems on a weary wall

And when light swivels off Angel Island and Alcatraz

when the bays leap into life

views of the Palace of Fine Arts,

TransAmerica

when sunset bathes the three bridges

still

old ghosts crouch hoarsely whispering

under Gold Mountain

North and east of the romantic headlands there are roads into tule

fog

places where life is cheap poor quick unmonumented

Rukeyser would have guessed it coming West for the opening

of the great red bridge  There are roads to take she wrote

when you think of your country driving south

to West Virginia Gauley Bridge silicon mines the flakes of it

heaped like snow, death-angel white

—poet journalist pioneer mother

uncovering her country: there are roads to take

I don’t want to know how he tracked them

along the Appalachian Trail, hid close

by their tent, pitched as they thought in seclusion

killing one woman, the other

dragging herself into town his defense they had teased his

loathing

of what they were I don’t want to know

but this is not a bad dream of mine these are the materials

and so are the smell of wild mint and coursing water remembered

and the sweet salt darkred tissue I lay my face

upon, my tongue within.

A crosshair against the pupil of an eye

could blow my life from hers

a cell dividing without maps, sliver of ice beneath a wheel

could do the job. Faithfulness isn’t the problem.

VII (The dream-site)

Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled

and others known and unknown there, long sweet summer eve-

ning on the tarred roof:

leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with stars

the Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousands

every known constellation flinging out fiery threads

and you could distinguish all

—cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of stars

coherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between

—you knew your way among them, knew you were part of them

until, neck aching, you sat straight up and saw:

It was New York, the dream-site

the lost city the city of dreadful light

where once as the sacks of garbage rose

like barricades around us we

stood listening to riffs from Pharaoh Sanders’ window

on the brownstone steps

went striding the avenues in our fiery hair

in our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways reading

or pressed against other bodies

feeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan

The Bronx unscrolling in the long breakneck

express plunges

as darkly we felt our own blood

streaming a living city overhead

coherently webbed and knotted bristling

we and all the others

known and unknown

living its life

VIII

He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him.

He depended on that:

the cuts would be made by someone else, the direction

come from somewhere else, arrows flashing on the freeway.

That he’d end somewhere gazing

straight into It was what he imagined and nothing beyond.

That he’d end facing as limit a thing without limits and so he

flung

and burned and hacked and bled himself toward that (if I

understand

this story at all). What he found: FOR SALE: DO NOT

DISTURB

OCCUPANT on some cliffs; some ill-marked, ill-kept roads

ending in warnings about shellfish in Vietnamese, Spanish and

English.

But the spray was any color he could have dreamed

—gold, ash, azure, smoke, moonstone—

and from time to time the ocean swirled up through the eye of a

rock and taught him

limits. Throwing itself backward, singing and sucking, no

teacher, only its violent

self, the Pacific, dialectical waters rearing

their wild calm constructs, momentary, ancient.

If your voice could overwhelm those waters, what would it say?

What would it cry of the child swept under, the mother

on the beach then, in her black bathing suit, walking straight

out

into the glazed lace as if she never noticed, what would it say of

the father

facing inland in his shoes and socks at the edge of the tide,

what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam?

If your voice could crack in the wind hold its breath still as the

rocks

what would it say to the daughter searching the tidelines for a

bottled message

from the sunken slaveships? what of the huge sun slowly defaulting into

the clouds

what of the picnic stored in the dunes at high tide, full of the

moon, the basket

with sandwiches, eggs, paper napkins, can-opener, the meal

packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling

ants, sandcrabs, dune-rats, because no one understood

all picnics are eaten on the grave?

IX

On this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you’re lonely.

Lonely in the bar, on the shore of the coastal river

with your best friend, his wife, and your wife, fishing

lonely in the prairie classroom with all the students who love

you. You know some ghosts

come everywhere with you yet leave them unaddressed

for years. You spend weeks in a house

with a drunk, you sober, whom you love, feeling lonely.

You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in

loneliness.

I wonder if this is a white man’s madness.

I honor your truth and refuse to leave it at that.

What have I learned from stories of the hunt, of lonely men in

gangs?

But there were other stories:

one man riding the Mohave Desert

another man walking the Grand Canyon.

I thought those solitary men were happy, as ever they had been.

Indio’s long avenues

of Medjool date-palm and lemon sweep to the Salton Sea

in Yucca Flats the high desert reaches higher, bleached and spare

of talk.

At Twentynine Palms I found the grave

of Maria Eleanor Whallon, eighteen years, dead at the watering-

hole in 1903, under the now fire-branded palms

Her mother travelled on alone to cook in the mining camps.

X

Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness, homesickness, lonely retreat.

Winter sun in the rosetrees.

An old Mexican with a white moustache prunes them back,

spraying

the cut branches with dormant oil. The old paper-bag-brown

adobe walls

stretch apart from the rebuilt mission, in their own time. It is

lonely here

in the curve of the road winding through vast brown fields

machine-engraved in furrows

of relentless precision. In the small chapel

Nuestra Señora de la Soledad dwells in her shallow arch

painted on either side with columns. She is in black lace crisp

as cinders

from head to foot. Alone, solitary, homesick

in her lonely retreat. Outside black olives fall and smash

littering and staining the beaten path. The gravestones of the

padres

are weights pressing down on the Indian artisans. It is the sixth

day of another war.

Across the freeway stands another structure

from the other side of the mirror it destroys

the logical processes of the mind, a man’s thoughts

become completely disorganized, madness streaming from every throat

frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls

the steel trays, iron beds bolted to the wall, the smells, the human waste.

To determine how men will behave once they enter prison

it is of first importance to know that prison. (From the freeway

gun-turrets planted like water-towers in another garden, out-

buildings spaced in winter sun

and the concrete mass beyond: who now writes letters deep in-

side that cave?)

If my instructor tells me that the world and its affairs

are run as well as they possibly can be, that I am governed

by wise and judicious men, that I am free and should be happy,

and if when I leave the instructor’s presence and encounter

the exact opposite, if I actually sense or see confusion, war,

recession, depression, death and decay, is it not reasonable

that I should become perplexed?

From eighteen to twenty-eight

of his years

a young man schools himself, argues,

debates, trains, lectures to himself,

teaches himself Swahili, Spanish, learns

five new words of English every day,

chainsmokes, reads, writes letters.

In this college of force he wrestles bitterness,

self-hatred, sexual anger, cures his own nature.

Seven of these years in solitary. Soledad.

But the significant feature of the desperate man reveals itself

when he meets other desperate men, directly or vicariously;

and he experiences his first kindness, someone to strain with him,

to strain to see him as he strains to see himself,

someone to understand, someone to accept the regard,

the love, that desperation forces into hiding.

Those feelings that find no expression in desperate times

store themselves up in great abundance, ripen, strengthen,

and strain the walls of their repository to the utmost;

where the kindred spirit touches this wall it crumbles—

no one responds to kindness, no one is more sensitive to it

than the desperate man.

XI

One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century:

a precise, detached calliper-grip holds the stars and quarter-

moon

in arrest: the hardiest plants crouch shrunken, a “killing frost”

on bougainvillea, Pride of Madeira, roseate black-purple succulents

bowed

juices sucked awry in one orgy of freezing

slumped on their stems like old faces evicted from cheap hotels

—into the streets of the universe, now!

Earthquake and drought followed by freezing followed by war.

Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming

and I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country.

The history of this earth and the bones within it?

Soils and cities, promises made and mocked, plowed contours of

shame and of hope?

Loyalties, symbols, murmurs extinguished and echoing?

Grids of states stretching westward, underground waters?

Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule

fibre, one woman

like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of

her task?

One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in

passing

—each of us now a driven grain, a nucleus, a city in crisis

some busy constructing enclosures, bunkers, to escape the com-

mon fate

some trying to revive dead statues to lead us, breathing their

breath against marble lips

some who try to teach the moment, some who preach the

moment

some who aggrandize, some who diminish themselves in the face

of half-grasped events

—power and powerlessness run amuck, a tape reeling backward

in jeering, screeching syllables—

some for whom war is new, others for whom it merely continues

the old paroxysms of time

some marching for peace who for twenty years did not march for

justice

some for whom peace is a white man’s word and a white man’s

privilege

some who have learned to handle and contemplate the shapes of

powerlessness and power

as the nurse learns hip and thigh and weight of the body he has

to lift and sponge, day upon day

as she blows with her every skill on the spirit’s embers still burn-

ing by their own laws in the bed of death.

A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one who wrestles for the

soul of her country

as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country

(gazing through the great circle at Window Rock into the sheen

of the Viet Nam Wall)

as he wrestles for his own being. A patriot is a citizen trying to

wake

from the burnt-out dream of innocence, the nightmare

of the white general and the Black general posed in their

camouflage,

to remember her true country, remember his suffering land:

remember

that blessing and cursing are born as twins and separated at birth

to meet again in mourning

that the internal emigrant is the most homesick of all women and

of all men

that every flag that flies today is a cry of pain.

Where are we moored?

What are the bindings?

What behooves us?

XIII  (Dedications)

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room

of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,

count themselves out, at too early an age. I know

you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your

hand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn

between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing

else left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

1990–1991

That Mouth

This is the girl’s mouth, the taste

daughters, not sons, obtain:

These are the lips, powerful rudders

pushing through groves of kelp,

the girl’s terrible, unsweetened taste

of the whole ocean, its fathoms: this is that taste.

This is not the father’s kiss, the mother’s:

a father can try to choke you,

a mother drown you to save you:

all the transactions have long been enacted.

This is neither a sister’s tale nor a brother’s:

strange trade-offs have long been made.

This is the swallow, the splash

of krill and plankton, that mouth

described as a girl’s—

enough to give you a taste:

Are you a daughter, are you a son?

Strange trade-offs have long been made.

1988

Marghanita

at the oak table under the ceiling fan

Marghanita at the table counting up

a dead woman’s debts.

Kicks off a sandal, sips

soda from a can, wedges the last bills

under the candelabrum. She is here

because no one else was there when worn-to-skeleton

her enemy died. Her love. Her twin.

Marghanita dreamed the intravenous, the intensive

the stainless steel

before she ever saw them. She’s not practical,

you know, they used to say.

She’s the artist, she got away.

In her own place Marghanita glues bronze

feathers into wings, smashes green and clear

bottles into bloodletting particles

crushed into templates of sand

scores mirrors till they fall apart and sticks them up

in driftwood boughs, drinks golden

liquid with a worm’s name, forgets

her main enemy, her twin;

scores her wrist on a birthday

dreams the hospital dream.

When they were girl and boy together, boy and girl

she pinned his arm against his back

for a box containing false

lashes and fingernails, a set of veils, a string of pearls,

she let go and listened to his tales

she breathed their breath, he hers,

they each had names only the other knew.

Marghanita in the apartment everyone has left:

not a nephew, not a niece,

nobody from the parish

—gone into hiding, emigrated, lost?

where are the others?

Marghanita comes back because she does,

adding up what’s left:

a rainsoaked checkbook, snapshots

razed from an album,

colors ground into powder, brushes, wands

for eyelids, lashes, brows,

beads of bath-oil, tubes of glycerin

—a dead woman’s luxuries.

Marghanita will

take care of it all. Pay if nothing else

the last month’s rent. The wings of the fan

stir corners of loose paper,

light ebbs from the window-lace,

she needs to go out and eat. And so

hating and loving come down

to a few columns of figures,

an aching stomach, a care taken: something done.

1989

Tattered Kaddish

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field

messenger from earthmire gleaning

transcripts of fog

in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month

speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:

Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel

on ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though its windows blew shut

on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved

loved it badly, too well, and not enough

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot

on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

Praise to life giving room and reason

to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

Praise to them, how they loved it, when they could.

1989

Final Notations

it will not be simple, it will not be long

it will take little time, it will take all your thought

it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath

it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart

it will not be long, it will occupy your thought

as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied

it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you

you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you

you are taking parts of us into places never planned

you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath

it will not be simple, it will become your will

1991

From

Dark Fields of the Republic

1995

What Kind of Times Are These

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows

uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but

don’t be fooled,

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

1991

In Those Years

In those years, people will say, we lost track

of the meaning of we, of you

we found ourselves

reduced to I

and the whole thing became

silly, ironic, terrible:

we were trying to live a personal life

and, yes, that was the only life

we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

into our personal weather

They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

along the shore, through the rags of fog

where we stood, saying I

1991

Calle Visión

1

Not what you thought: just a turn-off

leading downhill not up

narrow, doesn’t waste itself

has a house at the far end

scrub oak and cactus in the yard

some cats some snakes

in the house there is a room

in the room there is a bed

on the bed there is a blanket

that tells the coming of the railroad

under the blanket there are sheets

scrubbed transparent here and there

under the sheets there’s a mattress

the old rough kind, with buttons and ticking

under the mattress is a frame

of rusting iron still strong

the whole bed smells of soap and rust

the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain

this is your room

in Calle Visión

if you took the turn-off

it was for you

2

Calle Visión sand in your teeth

granules of cartilage in your wrists

Calle Visión firestorm behind

shuttered eyelids fire in your foot

Calle Visión rocking the gates

of your locked bones

Calle Visión dreamnet dropped

over your porous sleep

3

Lodged in the difficult hotel

all help withheld

a place not to live but to die in

not an inn but a hospital

a friend’s love came to me

touched and took me away

in a car love

of a curmudgeon, a short-fuse

and as he drove eyes on the road

I felt his love

and that was simply the case the way things were

unstated and apparent

and like the rest of it

clear as a dream

4

Calle Visión your heart beats on unbroken

how is this possible

Calle Visión wounded knee

wounded spine wounded eye

Have you ever worked around metal?

Are there particles under your skin?

Calle Visión but your heart is still whole

how is this possible

since what can be will be taken

when not offered in trust and faith

by the collectors of collectibles

the professors of what-has-been-suffered

The world is falling down hold my hand

It’s a lonely sound hold my hand

Calle Visión never forget

the body’s pain

never divide it

5

Ammonia

carbon dioxide

carbon monoxide

methane

hydrogen sulfide

: the gasses that rise from urine and feces

in the pig confinement units known as nurseries

can eat a metal doorknob off in half a year

pig-dander

dust from dry manure

—lung-scar: breath-shortedness an early symptom

And the fire shall try

every man’s work :Calle Visión:

and every woman’s

if you took the turn-off

this is your revelation this the source

6

The repetitive motions of slaughtering

—fire in wrists in elbows—

the dead birds coming at you along the line

—how you smell them in your sleep—

fire in your wrist blood packed

under your fingernails heavy air

doors padlocked on the outside

—you might steal a chicken—

fire in the chicken factory fire

in the carpal tunnel leaping the frying vats

yellow smoke from soybean oil

and wasted parts and insulating wire

—some fleeing to the freezer some

found “stuck in poses of escape”—

7

You can call on beauty still and it will leap

from all directions

you can write beauty into the cruel file

of things done things left undone but

once we were dissimilar

yet unseparate that’s beauty that’s what you catch

in the newborn’s midnight gaze

the fog that melts the falling stars

the virus from the smashed lianas driven

searching now for us

8

In the room in the house

in Calle Visión

all you want is to lie down

alone on your back let your hands

slide lightly over your hipbones

But she’s there with her remnants her cross-sections

trying to distract you

with her childhood her recipes her

cargo of charred pages her

carved and freckled neck-stones

her crying-out-for-witness her

backward-forward timescapes

her suitcase in Berlin

and the one lost and found

in her island go-and-come

—is she terrified you will forget her?

9

In the black net

of her orange wing

the angry nightblown butterfly

hangs on a piece of lilac in the sun

carried overland like her

from a long way off

She has travelled hard and far

and her interrogation goes:

—Hands dripping with wet earth

head full of shocking dreams

O what have you buried all these years

what have you dug up?

This place is alive with the dead and with the living

I have never been alone here

I wear my triple eye as I walk along the road

past, present, future all are at my side

Storm-beaten, tough-winged passenger

there is nothing I have buried that can die

10

On the road there is a house

scrub oak and cactus in the yard

lilac carried overland

from a long way off

in the house there is a bed

on the bed there is a blanket

telling the coming of the railroad

under the mattress there’s a frame

of rusting iron still strong

the window smells of old tobacco-dust and rain

the window smells of old

tobacco-dust and rain

1992–1993

Then or Now

Is it necessary for me to write obliquely

about the situation? Is that what

you would have me do?

FOOD PACKAGES: 1947

Powdered milk, chocolate bars, canned fruit, tea,

salamis, aspirin:

Four packages a month to her old professor in Heidelberg

and his Jewish wife:

Europe is trying to revive an intellectual life

and the widow of the great sociologist needs flour.

Europe is trying/to revive/

with the Jews somewhere else.

The young ex-philosopher tries to feed her teachers

all the way from New York, with orders for butter from Denmark,

sending dispatches into the fog

of the European spirit:

I am no longer German. I am a Jew and the German language

was once my home.

1993

INNOCENCE: 1945

“The beauty of it was the guilt.

It entered us, quick schnapps,

forked tongue of ice. The guilt

made us feel innocent again.

We had done nothing while some

extreme measures were taken. We drifted. In the

Snow Queen’s huge ballrom had dreamed

of the whole world and a new pair of skates.

But we had suffered too.

The miracle was: felt

nothing. Felt we had done

nothing. Nothing to do. Felt free.

And we had suffered, too.

It was that freedom we craved,

cold needle in the bloodstream.

Guilt after all was a feeling.”

1993

SUNSET, DECEMBER, 1993

Dangerous of course to draw

parallels Yet more dangerous to write

as if there were a steady course, we and our poems

protected: the individual life, protected

poems, ideas, gliding

in mid-air, innocent

I walked out on the deck and every board

was luminous with cold dew It could freeze tonight

Each board is different of course but each does gleam

wet, under a complicated sky: mounds of swollen ink

heavy gray unloading up the coast

a rainbow suddenly and casually

unfolding its span

Dangerous not to think

how the earth still was in places

while the chimneys shuddered with the first dischargements

1993

DEPORTATIONS

It’s happened already while we were still

searching for patterns A turn of the head

toward a long horizontal window overlooking the city

to see people being taken

neighbors, vendors, paramedicals

hurried from their porches, their tomato stalls

their auto-mechanic arguments

and children from schoolyards

There are far more of the takers-away than the taken

at this point anyway

Then: dream-cut: our house:

four men walk through the unlatched door

One in light summer wool and silken tie

One in work clothes browned with blood

One with open shirt, a thin

thong necklace hasped with silver around his neck

One in shorts naked up from the navel

And they have come for us, two of us and four of them

and I think, perhaps they are still human

and I ask them When do you think all this began?

as if trying to distract them from their purpose

as if trying to appeal to a common bond

as if one of them might be you

as if I were practicing for something

yet to come

1994

AND NOW

And now as you read these poems

—you whose eyes and hands I love

—you whose mouth and eyes I love

—you whose words and minds I love—

don’t think I was trying to state a case

or construct a scenery:

I tried to listen to

the public voice of our time

tried to survey our public space

as best I could

—tried to remember and stay

faithful to details, note

precisely how the air moved

and where the clock’s hands stood

and who was in charge of definitions

and who stood by receiving them

when the name of compassion

was changed to the name of guilt

when to feel with a human stranger

was declared obsolete.

1994

Late Ghazal

Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror.

First rains of the winter morning’s smallest hour.

Go back to the ghazal then what will you do there?

Life always pulsed harder than the lines.

Do you remember the strands that ran from eye to eye?

The tongue that reached everywhere, speaking all the parts?

Everything there was cast in an image of desire.

The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry.

I took my body anyplace with me.

In the thickets of abstraction my skin ran with blood.

Life was always stronger . . . the critics couldn’t get it.

Memory says the music always ran ahead of the words.

1994

from Inscriptions

ONE: COMRADE

Little as I knew you I know you:  little as you knew me you

know me

—that’s the light we stand under when we meet.

I’ve looked into flecked jaws

walked injured beaches footslick in oil

watching licked birds stumble in flight

while you drawn through the pupil of your eye

across your own oceans in visionary pain and in relief

headlong and by choice took on the work of charting

your city’s wounds ancient and fertile

listening for voices within and against.

My testimony: yours: Trying to keep faith

not with each other exactly yet it’s the one known and unknown

who stands for, imagines the other with whom faith could

be kept.

In city your mind burns wanes waxes with hope

(no stranger to bleakness you: worms have toothed at

your truths

but you were honest regarding that).

You conspired to compile the illegal discography

of songs forbidden to sing or to be heard.

If there were ethical flowers one would surely be yours

and I’d hand it to you headlong across landmines

across city’s whyless sleeplight I’d hand it

purposefully, with love, a hand trying to keep beauty afloat

on the bacterial waters.

When a voice learns to sing it can be heard as dangerous

when a voice learns to listen it can be heard as desperate.

The self unlocked to many selves.

A mirror handed to one who just released

from the locked ward from solitary from preventive detention

sees in her thicket of hair her lost eyebrows

whole populations.

One who discharged from war stares in the looking-glass of home

at what he finds there, sees in the undischarged tumult of his

own eye

how thickskinned peace is, and those who claim to promote it.

TWO: MOVEMENT

Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean’s light

Talking of angles of vision movements a black or a red tulip

opening

Times of walking across a street thinking

not I have joined a movement but I am stepping in this deep current

Part of my life washing behind me terror I couldn’t swim with

part of my life waiting for me a part I had no words for

I need to live each day through have them and know them all

though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.

When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?

How do you know you’re not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia,

stagnation

but entering that deep current malachite, colorado

requiring all your strength wherever found

your patience and your labor

desire pitted against desire’s inversion

all your mind’s fortitude?

Maybe through a teacher: someone with facts with numbers

with poetry

who wrote on the board: IN EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES

OUR DREAMS.

Maybe a student: one mind unfurling like a redblack peony

quenched into percentile, dropout, stubbed-out bud

—Your journals Patricia: Douglas your poems: but the repetitive

blows

on spines whose hope you were, on yours:

to see that quenching and decide.

—And now she turns her face brightly on the new morning in

the new classroom

new in her beauty her skin her lashes her lively body:

Race, class . . . all that . . . but isn’t all that just history?

Aren’t people bored with it all?

She could be

myself at nineteen but free of reverence for past ideas

ignorant of hopes piled on her She’s a mermaid

momentarily precipitated from a solution

which could stop her heart She could swim or sink

like a beautiful crystal.

FOUR: HISTORY

Should I simplify my life for you?

Don’t ask how I began to love men.

Don’t ask how I began to love women.

Remember the forties songs, the slowdance numbers

the small sex-filled gas-rationed Chevrolet?

Remember walking in the snow and who was gay?

Cigarette smoke of the movies, silver-and-gray

profiles, dreaming the dreams of he-and-she

breathing the dissolution of the wisping silver plume?

Dreaming that dream we leaned applying lipstick

by the gravestone’s mirror when we found ourselves

playing in the cemetery. In Current Events she said

the war in Europe is over, the Allies

and she wore no lipstick have won the war

and we raced screaming out of Sixth Period.

Dreaming that dream

we had to maze our ways through a wood

where lips were knives breasts razors and I hid

in the cage of my mind scribbling

this map stops where it all begins

into a red-and-black notebook.

Remember after the war when peace came down

as plenty for some and they said we were saved

in an eternal present and we knew the world could end?

—remember after the war when peace rained down

on the winds from Hiroshima Nagasaki Utah Nevada?

and the socialist queer Christian teacher jumps from the

hotel window?

and L.G. saying I want to sleep with you but not for sex

and the red-and-black enamelled coffee-pot dripped slow through

the dark grounds

—appetite terror power tenderness

the long kiss in the stairwell the switch thrown

on two Jewish Communists married to each other

the definitive crunch of glass at the end of the wedding?

(When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,

We cannot choose what we are free to love?)

SIX: EDGELIT

Living under fire in the raincolored opal of your love

I could have forgotten other women I desired

so much I wanted to love them but

here are some reasons love would not let me:

One had a trick of dropping her lashes along her cheekbone

in an amazing screen so she saw nothing.

Another would stand in summer arms rounded and warm

catching wild apricots that fell

either side of a broken fence but she caught them on one

side only.

One, ambitious, flushed

to the collarbone, a shapely coward.

One keen as mica, glittering,

full at the lips, absent at the core.

One who flirted with danger

had her escape route planned when others had none

and disappeared.

One sleepwalking on the trestle

of privilege dreaming of innocence

tossing her cigarette into the dry gully

—an innocent gesture.

Medbh’s postcard from Belfast:

one’s poetry seems aimless

covered in the blood and lies

oozing corrupt & artificial

but of course one will continue . . .

This week I’ve dredged my pages

for anything usable

head, heart, perforated

by raw disgust and fear

If I dredge up anything it’s suffused

by what it works in, “like the dyer’s hand”

I name it unsteady, slick, unworthy

and I go on

In my sixty-fifth year I know something about language:

it can eat or be eaten by experience

Medbh, poetry means refusing

the choice to kill or die

but this life of continuing is for the sane mad

and the bravest monsters

The bright planet that plies her crescent shape

in the western air that through the screendoor gazes

with her curved eye now speaks: The beauty of darkness

is how it lets you see. Through the screendoor

she told me this and half-awake I scrawled

her words on a piece of paper.

She is called Venus but I call her You

You who sees me You who calls me to see

You who has other errands far away in space and time

You in your fiery skin acetylene

scorching the claims of the false mystics

You who like the moon arrives in crescent

changeable changer speaking truth from darkness

Edgelit: firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds

blue-green agave grown huge in flower

cries of birds streaming over

The night of the eclipse the full

moon

swims clear between flying clouds until

the hour of the occlusion It’s not of aging

anymore and its desire

which is of course unending

it’s of dying young or old

in full desire

Remember me. . . . O, O, O,

O, remember me

these vivid stricken cells

precarious living marrow

this my labyrinthine filmic brain

this my dreaded blood

this my irreplaceable

footprint vanishing from the air

dying in full desire

thirsting for the coldest water

hungering for hottest food

gazing into the wildest light

edgelight from the high desert

where shadows drip from tiniest stones

sunklight of bloody afterglow

torque of the Joshua tree

flinging itself forth in winter

factoring freeze into its liquid consciousness

These are the extremes I stoke

into the updraft of this life

still roaring

into thinnest air

1993–1994

From

Midnight Salvage

1999

For an Anniversary

The wing of the osprey lifted

over the nest on Tomales Bay

into fog and difficult gust

raking treetops from Inverness Ridge on over

The left wing shouldered into protective

gesture the left wing we thought broken

and the young beneath in the windy nest

creaking there in their hunger

and the tides beseeching, besieging

the bay in its ruined languor

1996

Midnight Salvage

1

Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I

sought the light of a so-called heavenly body

: : a planet or our moon in some event and caught

nothing nothing but a late wind

pushing around some Monterey pines

themselves in trouble and rust-limbed

Nine o’clock : : July : the light

undrained : : that blotted blue

that lets has let will let

thought’s blood ebb between life- and death-time

darkred behind darkblue

bad news pulsing back and forth of “us” and “them”

And all I wanted was to find an old

friend an old figure an old trigonometry

still true to our story in orbits flaming or cold

2

Under the conditions of my hiring

I could profess or declare anything at all

since in that place nothing would change

So many fountains, such guitars at sunset

Did not want any more to sit under such a window’s

deep embrasure, wisteria bulging on spring air

in that borrowed chair

with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk

under photographs of the spanish steps, Keats’ death mask

and the english cemetery all so under control and so eternal

in burnished frames : : or occupy the office

of the marxist-on-sabbatical

with Gramsci’s fast-fading eyes

thumbtacked on one wall opposite a fading print

of the same cemetery : : had memories

and death masks of my own : : could not any more

peruse young faces already straining for

the production of slender testaments

to swift reading and current thinking : : would not wait

for the stroke of noon to declare all passions obsolete

Could not play by the rules

in that palmy place : : nor stand at lectern professing

anything at all

in their hire

3

Had never expected hope would form itself

completely in my time : : was never so sanguine

as to believe old injuries could transmute easily

through any singular event or idea : : never

so feckless as to ignore the managed contagion

of ignorance the contrived discontinuities

the felling of leaders and future leaders

the pathetic erections of soothsayers

But thought I was conspiring, breathing-along

with history’s systole-diastole

twenty thousand leagues under the sea a mammal heartbeat

sheltering another heartbeat

plunging from the Farallons all the way to Baja

sending up here or there a blowhole signal

and sometimes beached

making for warmer waters

where the new would be delivered : : though I would not see it

4

But neither was expecting in my time

to witness this : : wasn’t deep

lucid or mindful you might say enough

to look through history’s bloodshot eyes

into this commerce this dreadnought wreck cut loose

from all vows, oaths, patents, compacts, promises : :

To see

not O my Captain

fallen cold & dead by the assassin’s hand

but cold alive & cringing : : drinking with the assassins

in suit of noir Hong Kong silk

pushing his daughter in her famine-

waisted flamingo gown

out on the dance floor with the traffickers

in nerve gas saying to them Go for it

and to the girl Get with it

5

When I ate and drank liberation once I walked

arm-in-arm with someone who said she had something to teach me

It was the avenue and the dwellers

free of home : roofless : : women

without pots to scour or beds to make

or combs to run through hair

or hot water for lifting grease or cans

to open or soap to slip in that way

under arms then beneath breasts then downward to thighs

Oil-drums were alight under the freeway

and bottles reached from pallets of cardboard corrugate

and piles of lost and found to be traded back and forth

and figures arranging themselves from the wind

Through all this she walked me : : And said

My name is Liberation and I come from here

Of what are you so afraid?

We’ve hung late in the bars like bats

kissed goodnight at the stoplights

—did you think I wore this city without pain?

did you think I had no family?

6

Past the curve where the old craftsman was run down

there’s a yard called Midnight Salvage

He was walking in the road which was always safe

The young driver did not know that road

its curves or that people walked there

or that you could speed yet hold the curve

watching for those who walked there

such skills he did not have being in life unpracticed

but I have driven that road in madness and driving rain

thirty years in love and pleasure and grief-blind

on ice I have driven it and in the vague haze of summer

between clumps of daisies and sting of fresh cowflop odors

lucky I am I hit nobody old or young

killed nobody left no trace

practiced in life as I am

7

This horrible patience which is part of the work

This patience which waits for language for meaning for the

least sign

This encumbered plodding state doggedly dragging

the IV up and down the corridor

with the plastic sack of bloodstained urine

Only so can you start living again

waking to take the temperature of the soul

when the black irises lean at dawn

from the mouth of the bedside pitcher

This condition in which you swear I will

submit to whatever poetry is

I accept no limits Horrible patience

8

You cannot eat an egg You don’t know where it’s been

The ordinary body of the hen

vouchsafes no safety The countryside refuses to supply

Milk is powdered meat’s in both senses high

Old walls the pride of architects collapsing

find us in crazed niches sleeping like foxes

we wanters we unwanted we

wanted for the crime of being ourselves

Fame slides on its belly like any other animal after food

Ruins are disruptions of system leaking in

weeds and light redrawing

the City of Expectations

You cannot eat an egg Unstupefied not unhappy

we braise wild greens and garlic feed the feral cats

and when the fog’s irregular documents break open

scan its fissures for young stars

in the belt of Orion

1996

Char

1

There is bracken there is the dark mulberry

there is the village where no villager survived

there are the hitlerians there are the foresters

feeding the partisans from frugal larders

there is the moon ablaze in every quarter

there is the moon “of tin and sage” and unseen pilots dropping

explosive gifts into meadows of fog and crickets

there is the cuckoo and the tiny snake

there is the table set at every meal

for freedom whose chair stays vacant

the young men in their newfound passions

(Love along with them the ones they love)

Obscurity, code, the invisible existence

of a thrush in the reeds, the poet watching

as the blood washes off the revolver in the bucket

Redbreast, your song shakes loose a ruin of memories

A horrible day . . . Perhaps he knew, at that final instant?

The village had to be spared at any price . . .

How can you hear me? I speak from so far . . .

The flowering broom hid us in a blazing yellow mist . . .

2

This war will prolong itself beyond any platonic armistice. The implanting

of political concepts will go on amid upheavals and under cover of

self-confident hypocrisy. Don’t smile. Thrust aside both skepticism and resignation

and prepare your soul to face an intramural confrontation with

demons as cold-blooded as microbes.

The poet in wartime, the Surréalistes’ younger brother

turned realist (the village had to be spared at any price)

all eyes on him in the woods crammed with maquisards expecting him to

signal to fire and save their comrade

shook his head and watched Bernard’s execution

knowing that the random shooting of a revolver

may be the simplest surreal act but never

changes the balance of power and that real acts are not simple

The poet, prone to exaggerate, thinks clearly under torture

knowing the end of the war

would mean no end to the microbes frozen in each soul

the young freedom fighters

in love with the Resistance

fed by a thrill for violence

familiar as his own jaw under the razor

3

Insoluble riverrain conscience echo of the future

I keep vigil for you here by the reeds of Elkhorn Slough

and the brown mouth of the Salinas River going green

where the white egret fishes the fragile margins

Hermetic guide in resistance I’ve found you and lost you

several times in my life You were never just

the poet appalled and transfixed by war you were the maker

of terrible delicate decisions and that did not smudge

your sense of limits You saw squirrels crashing

from the tops of burning pines when the canister exploded

and worse and worse and you were in charge of every risk

the incendiary motives of others were in your charge

and the need for a courage wrapped in absolute tact

and you decided and lived like that and you

held poetry at your lips a piece of wild thyme ripped

from a burning meadow a mimosa twig

from still unravaged country You kept your senses

about you like that and like this I keep vigil for you.

1996

Letters to a Young Poet

1

Your photograph won’t do you justice

those wetted anthill mounds won’t let you focus

that lens on the wetlands

five swans chanting overhead

distract your thirst for closure

and quick escape

2

Let me turn you around in your frozen nightgown and say

one word to you: Ineluctable

—meaning, you won’t get quit

of this: the worst of the new news

history running back and forth

panic in the labyrinth

—I will not touch you further:

your choice to freeze or not

to say, you and I are caught in

a laboratory without a science

3

Would it gladden you to think

poetry could purely

take its place beneath lightning sheets

or fogdrip live its own life

screamed at, howled down

by a torn bowel of dripping names

—composers visit Terezin, film-makers Sarajevo

Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses

ineluctable

if a woman as vivid as any artist

can fling any day herself from the 14th floor

would it relieve you to decide Poetry

doesn’t make this happen?

4

From the edges of your own distraction turn

the cloth-weave up, its undersea-fold venous

with sorrow’s wash and suck, pull and release,

annihilating rush

to and fro, fabric of caves, the onset of your fear

kicking away their lush and slippery flora nurseried

in liquid glass

trying to stand fast in rootsuck, in distraction,

trying to wade this

undertow of utter repetition

Look: with all my fear I’m here with you, trying what it

means, to stand fast; what it means to move

5

Beneaped. Rowboat, pirogue, caught between the lowest

and highest tides of spring. Beneaped. Befallen,

becalmed, benighted, yes, begotten.

—Be—infernal prefix of the actionless.

—Be—as in Sit, Stand, Lie, Obey.

The dog’s awful desire that takes his brain

and lays it at the boot-heel.

You can be like this forever—Be

as without movement.

6

But this is how

I come, anyway, pushing up from below

my head wrapped in a chequered scarf a lanterned helmet on this

head

pushing up out of the ore

this sheeted face this lanterned head facing the seep of death

my lips having swum through silt

clearly pronouncing

Hello and farewell

Who, anyway, wants to know

this pale mouth, this stick

of crimson lipsalve Who my

dragqueen’s vocal chords my bitter beat

my overshoulder backglance flung

at the great strophes and antistrophes

my chant my ululation my sacred parings

nails, hair my dysentery my hilarious throat

my penal colony’s birdstarved ledge my face downtown

in films by Sappho and Artaud?

Everyone. For a moment.

7

It’s not the déjà vu that kills

it’s the foreseeing

the head that speaks from the crater

I wanted to go somewhere

the brain had not yet gone

I wanted not to be

there so alone.

1997

Camino Real

Hot stink of skunk

crushed at the vineyards’ edge

hawk-skied, carrion-clean

clouds ranging themselves

over enormous autumn

that scribble edged and skunky

as the great road winds on

toward my son’s house seven hours south

Walls of the underpass

smudged and blistered eyes gazing from armpits

THE WANTER WANTED ARMED IN LOVE AND

DANGEROUS

WANTED FOR WANTING

To become the scholar of : :

: : to list compare contrast events to footnote lesser evils

calmly to note “bedsprings”

describe how they were wired

to which parts of the body

to make clear-eyed assessments of the burnt-out eye : : investigate

the mouth-bit and the mouth

the half-swole slippery flesh the enforced throat

the whip they played you with the backroad games the beatings by

the river

O to list collate commensurate to quantify:

I was the one, I suffered, I was there

never

to trust to memory only

to go back notebook in hand

dressed as no one there was dressed

over and over to quantify

on a gridded notebook page

The difficulty of proving

such things were done for no reason

that every night

“in those years”

people invented reasons for torture

Asleep now, head in hands

hands over ears O you

Who do this work

every one of you

every night

Driving south: santabarbara’s barbarous

landscaped mind: lest it be forgotten

in the long sweep downcoast

let it not be exonerated

but O the light

on the raw Pacific silks

Charles Olson: “Can you afford not to make

the magical study

which happiness is?”

I take him to mean

that happiness is in itself a magical study

a glimpse of the unhandicapped life

as it might be for anyone, somewhere

a kind of alchemy, a study of transformation

else it withers, wilts

—that happiness is not to be

mistrusted or wasted

though it ferment in grief

George Oppen to June Degnan: “I don’t know how

to measure happiness”

—Why measure? in itself it’s the measure—

at the end of a day

of great happiness if there be such a day

drawn by love’s unprovable pull

I write this, sign it

Adrienne

1997

Seven Skins

1

Walk along back of the library

in 1952

someone’s there to catch your eye

Vic Greenberg in his wheelchair

paraplegic GI—

Bill of Rights Jew

graduate student going in

by the only elevator route

up into the great stacks where

all knowledge should and is

and shall be stored like sacred grain

while the loneliest of lonely

American decades goes aground

on the postwar rock

and some unlikely

shipmates found ourselves

stuck amid so many smiles

Dating Vic Greenberg you date

crutches and a chair

a cool wit an outrageous form:

“—just back from a paraplegics’ conference,

guess what the biggest meeting was about—

Sex with a Paraplegic!—for the wives—”

In and out of cabs his chair

opening and closing round his

electrical monologue the air

furiously calm around him

as he transfers to the crutches

But first you go for cocktails

in his room at Harvard

he mixes the usual martinis, plays Billie Holiday

talks about Melville’s vision of evil

and the question of the postwar moment:

Is there an American civilization?

In the bathroom huge

grips and suction-cupped

rubber mats long-handled sponges

the reaching tools a veteran’s benefits

in plainest sight

And this is only memory, no more

so this is how you remember

Vic Greenberg takes you to the best restaurant

which happens to have no stairs

for talk about movies, professors, food

Vic orders wine and tastes it

you have lobster, he Beef Wellington

the famous dessert is baked alaska

ice cream singed in a flowerpot

from the oven, a live tulip inserted there

Chair to crutches, crutches to cab

chair in the cab and back to Cambridge

memory shooting its handheld frames

Shall I drop you, he says, or shall

we go back to the room for a drink?

It’s the usual question

a man has to ask it

a woman has to answer

you don’t even think

2

What a girl I was then what a body

ready for breaking open like a lobster

what a little provincial village

what a hermit crab seeking nobler shells

what a beach of rattling stones what an offshore raincloud

what a gone-and-come tidepool

what a look into eternity I took and did not return it

what a book I made myself

what a quicksilver study

bright little bloodstain

liquid pouches escaping

What a girl pelican-skimming over fear what a mica lump

splitting

into tiny sharp-edged mirrors through which

the sun’s eclipse could seem normal

what a sac of eggs what a drifting flask

eager to sink to be found

to disembody what a mass of swimmy legs

3

Vic into what shoulder could I have pushed your face

laying hands first on your head

onto whose thighs pulled down your head

which fear of mine would have wound itself

around which of yours could we have taken it nakedness

without sperm in what insurrectionary

convulsion would we have done it mouth to mouth

mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anus earlobe to nipple

what seven skins each have to molt what seven shifts

what tears boil up through sweat to bathe

what humiliatoriums what layers of imposture

What heroic tremor

released into pure moisture

might have soaked our shape two-headed avid

into your heretic

linen-service

sheets?

1997

Rusted Legacy

Imagine a city where nothing’s

forgiven your deed adheres

to you like a scar, a tattoo but almost everything’s

forgotten deer flattened leaping a highway for food

the precise reason for the shaving of the confused girl’s head

the small boys’ punishing of the frogs

—a city memory-starved but intent on retributions

Imagine the architecture the governance

the men and the women in power

—tell me if it is not true you still

live in that city.

Imagine a city partitioned divorced from its hills

where temples and telescopes used to probe the stormy codices

a city brailling through fog

thicket and twisted wire

into dark’s velvet dialectic

sewers which are also rivers

art’s unchartered aquifers the springhead

sprung open in civic gardens left unlocked at night

I finger the glass beads I strung and wore

under the pines while the arrests were going on

(transfixed from neck to groin I wanted to save what I could)

They brought trays with little glasses of cold water

into the dark park a final village gesture

before the villages were gutted.

They were trying to save what they could

—tell me if this is not the same city.

I have forced myself to come back like a daughter

required to put her mother’s house in order

whose hands need terrible gloves to handle

the medicinals the disease packed in those linens

Accomplished criminal I’ve been but

can I accomplish justice here? Tear the old wedding sheets

into cleaning rags? Faithless daughter

like stone but with water pleating across

Let water be water let stone be stone

Tell me is this the same city.

This I—must she, must she lie scabbed with rust

crammed with memory in a place

of little anecdotes no one left

to go around gathering the full dissident story?

Rusting her hands and shoulders stone her lips

yet leaching down from her eyesockets tears

—for one self only? each encysts a city.

1997

From

Fox

2001

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

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

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

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

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

Four Short Poems

1

(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

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?

2000

Notes

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS

The Snow Queen. Hans Christian Andersen’s tale was the point of departure.

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. The lines in Part 7 beginning “To have in this uncertain world some stay” were written by Mary Wollstonecraft in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London, 1787).

NECESSITIES OF LIFE

In the Woods. The first line is borrowed and translated from the Dutch poet, J. C. Bloem.

“I Am in Danger—Sir—.” See The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds., Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 409.

LEAFLETS

Orion. One or two phrases suggested by Gottfried Benn’s essay, “Artists and Old Age,” in Primal Vision: Selected Writings, ed. E. B. Ashton. (New York: New Directions, 1960).

For a Russian Poet. Part 3 is based on an account by the poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya of a protest action against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Gorbanevskaya was later held, and bore a child, in a “penal mental institution” for her political activities.

Leaflets. “The love of a fellow-creature in all its fullness consists simply in the ability to say to him, ‘What are you going through?’”—Simone Weil.

Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib. This poem began to be written after I read Aijaz Ahmad’s literal English versions of the Urdu poetry of Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869). While the structure and metrics of the classical ghazal form used by Ghalib are much stricter than mine, I adhered to his use of a minimum five couplets to a ghazal, each couplet being autonomous and independent of the others. The continuity and unity flow from the associations and images playing back and forth among the couplets in any single ghazal. The poems are dated as I wrote them, during a month in the summer of 1968. Although I was a contributor to Ahmad’s The Ghazals of Ghalib (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), the ghazals here are not translations but original poems.

UNCOLLECTED POEMS 1950–1974

The first two poems in this section were “lost” for a long time; I had even forgotten their existence. “The Prisoners” first appeared in The Harvard Advocate, and “At the Jewish New Year” in The New Yorker. “Dien Bien Phu” appeared in Nimrod.

From an Old House in America. Part 4: The first line is borrowed from Emily Brontë’s poem, “Stanzas.”

Part 7: Many African women went into labor and gave birth on the slave-ships of the Middle Passage, chained for the duration of the voyage to the dying or the dead.

Part 11: Datura is a poisonous hallucinogenic weed with a spiky green pod and a white flower; also known as jimson-weed, or deadly nightshade.

A WILD PATIENCE HAS TAKEN ME THIS FAR

Grandmothers. Part 3: Italicized lines are quoted from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 39.

The Spirit of Place. Italicized passages in Part 3 are from The Letters of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), specifically, from Letter 154 to Susan Gilbert (June 1854) and Letter 203 to Catherine Scott Anthon Turner (March 1859).

YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE

North American Time. Julia de Burgos (1914–1953): Puerto Rican poet and revolutionary, who died on the streets of New York City.

Contradictions. 26: See Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), p. 255: “the glorious So What: the life-cry.”

27: Ding Ling, leading Chinese novelist and major literary figure in the Revolutionary government under Mao. Exiled in 1957 for writing too critically and independently. Imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary in 1970; cleared of all charges in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution.

TIME’S POWER

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 (Latham, N.Y.: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press). 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).

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.

AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD

An Atlas of the Difficult World. V: “over the chained bay waters.” From Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” in The Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York and London: Liveright, 1989; poem originally published in 1930). “There are roads to take when you think of your country.” From Muriel Rukeyser, U. S. 1 (New York: Covici Friede, 1938); see also Muriel Rukeyser, The Collected Poems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978). “I don’t want to know how he tracked them.” On May 13, 1988, Stephen Roy Carr shot and killed Rebecca Wight, one of two lesbians camping on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania. Her lover, Claudia Brenner, suffered five bullet wounds. She dragged herself two miles along the trail to a road, where she flagged a car to take her to the police. In October of that year, Carr was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. During the legal proceedings, it became clear that Carr had attacked the women because they were lesbians. See Gay Community News (August 7 and November 11, 1988).

X: The passages in italics are quoted from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam, 1970), pp. 24, 26, 93, 245.

Tattered Kaddish. “The Reapers of the Field are the Comrades, masters of this wisdom, because Malkhut is called the Apple Field, and She grows sprouts of secrets and new meanings of Torah. Those who constantly create new interpretations of Torah are the ones who reap Her” (Moses Cordovero, Or ha-Hammah on Zohar III, 106a). See Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (New York: Summit, 1984), p. 305.

DARK FIELDS OF THE REPUBLIC

What Kind of Times Are These. The title is from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “An Die Nachgeborenen” (“For Those Born Later”): What kind of times are these / When it’s almost a crime to talk about trees / Because it means keeping still about so many evil deeds? (For the complete poem, in a different translation, see John Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds., Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956 [New York: Methuen, 1976], pp. 318–320.)

“our country moving closer to its own truth and dread . . .” echoes Osip Mandelstam’s 1921 poem that begins I was washing outside in the darkness and ends The earth’s moving closer to truth and to dread. (Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, trans., Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems [New York: Atheneum, 1974], p. 40.) Mandelstam was forbidden to publish, then exiled and sentenced to five years of hard labor for a poem caricaturing Stalin; he died in a transit camp in 1938.

Calle Visión. Calle Visión is the name of a road in the southwestern United States—literally, “Vision Street.”

1: “that tells the coming of the railroad.” “With the coming of the railroad, new materials and pictorial designs and motifs, including trains themselves, appeared in Navaho weaving (ca. 1880).” (From the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe.)

3: “a place not to live but to die in.” See Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1635): “For the World, I count it not an Inn, but an Hospital; and a place not to live, but to dye in.” (Religio Medici and Other Writings by Sir Thomas Browne [London: Everyman’s Library, J. M. Dent, 1947], p. 83.)

4: “Have you ever worked around metal? . . .” From a questionnaire filled out before undergoing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.

“The world is falling down. . . .” From the song “The World Is Falling Down,” composed by Abbey Lincoln, sung by her on the Verve recording of the same title, 1990 (Moseka Music BMI).

5: “And the fire shall try. . . .” I Corinthians 3:13: “Every man’s work shall be made manifest . . . and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” Used by Studs Terkel as an epigraph to his Working (New York: Pantheon, 1974).

Then or Now. This sequence of poems derives in part from Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimbel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). While reading these letters, I had been reflecting on concepts of “guilt” and “innocence” among artists and intellectuals like myself in the United States. The poems owe much also to the continuing pressure of events.

Late Ghazal. See “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)” and “The Blue Ghazals,” in Adrienne Rich, Collected Early Poems: 1950–1970 (New York: Norton, 1993), pp. 339–355, 368–372. See also Aijaz Ahmad, ed., Ghazals of Ghalib (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971).

Inscriptions. “Two: movement”: “I need to live each day through. . . .” These two lines are quoted from an earlier poem of mine (“8/8/68: I”) in “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)”; see above.

“Four:history”: “When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,. . . .?” These two lines are from W. H. Auden’s “Canzone,” in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 161.

“Six: edgelit”: “Medbh’s postcard from Belfast.” I thank the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian for permission to quote her words from a postcard received in August 1994.

“suffused / by what it works in, ‘like the dyer’s hand.’” I had written “suffused,” later began looking up the line I was quoting from memory: was it Coleridge? Keats? Shakespeare? My friend Barbara Gelpi confirmed it was Shakespeare, in his Sonnet III: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand / And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. I have kept “suffused” here because to feel suffused by the materials that one has perforce to work in is not necessarily to be subdued, though some might think so.

MIDNIGHT SALVAGE

Char. Italicized phrases and some images from Leaves of Hypnos, the journal kept in 1942–1943 by the poet René Char while he was a commander in the French Resistance, and from some of Char’s poems. I have drawn on both Jackson Mathews’s and Cid Corman’s translations of Char’s journal in integrating his words into my poem. Char joined the Surrealist movement late and broke with it prior to World War II. It was André Breton who said, “The simplest surrealist act consists of going down into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random.”

Camino Real. “Can you afford not to make / the magical study / which happiness is?” From Charles Olson, “Variations Done for Gerald Van der Wiele,” in Charles Olson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 83.

“George Oppen to June Degnan: . . .” See The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 212.

FOX

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.

Index

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

Abnegation, 55

A conversation begins, 138

Across a city from you, I’m with you, 151

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something, 233

A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent, 136

A knight rides into the noon, 16

All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken television set, 310

All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and Peace, 215

A man in terror of impotence, 105

And Now, 264

And now as you read these poems, 264

And now, outside, the walls, 52

Antinoüs: The Diaries, 21

A nurse on the battlefield, 115

A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design, 67

Architect, 302

At a Bach Concert, 5

Atlas of the Difficult World, An, 233

At the Jewish New Year, 113

at the oak table under the ceiling fan, 247

August, 109

Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers, 4

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen, 4

Autumn torture. The old signs, 21

A white woman dreaming of innocence, 194

A wild patience has taken me this far, 171

A woman in the shape of a monster, 73

Beethoven’s “Appassionata” played on a parlor grand piano, 309

Before the acute, 307

Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever—, 64

Blue Rock, 201

Boundary, 4

Burning of Paper Instead of Children, The, 75

Burning Oneself In, 107

But neither was expecting in my time, 277

Calle Visión, 254

Camino Real, 286

Can it be growing colder when I begin, 153

Cartographies of Silence, 138

Char, 280

Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest, 216

Child with a chip of mirror in his eye, 10

Coming by evening through the wintry city, 5

Comrade, 265

Contradictions: Tracking Poems, 203

Crib, The, 36

Dangerous of course to draw, 262

Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain, 205

Dear Adrienne: I’m calling you up tonight, 205

(Dedications), 245

Deliberately, long ago, 119

Delta, 224

Demon Lover, The, 47

Demonstration, The, 54

Deportations, 263

Desert as Garden of Paradise, The, 217

Dialogue, 100

Did the fox speak to you?, 196

Did you think I was talking about my life?, 64

Dien Bien Phu, 115

“Difficult ordinary happiness,” 31

Diving into the Wreck, 101

(dream-site, The), 239

Dreamwood, 224

(driving home from Robin Blaser’s reading), 308

Edgelit, 268

Either you will, 24

Enclosed in this disturbing mutual wood, 113

Ends of the Earth, 310

Europe 1953:, 174

Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, 148

Everywhere, snow is falling. Your bandaged foot, 53

Fact of a Doorframe, The, 131

Far back when I went zig-zagging, 45

Fatigue, regrets. The lights, 47

Final Notations, 250

Fire, 304

First having read the book of myths, 101

Focus, 41

Food Packages: 1947, 261

Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror, 264

For an Anniversary, 275

For an Occupant, 196

For a Russian Poet, 53

Foreknown. The victor, 79

For Ethel Rosenberg, 174

For Memory, 173

For more than five thousand years, 113

For the Record, 193

Four Short Poems, 308

Fox, 303

Frame, 187

From an Old House in America, 119

From a Survivor, 108

From here on, all of us will be living, 67

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg, 15

From the new crudities, from the old, 309

From the Prison House, 96

Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib, 63

Granddaughter, 180

Grandmothers, 179

Guard the knowledge, 217

Had never expected hope would form itself, 277

“Half-cracked” to Higginson, living, 38

Harpers Ferry, 225

Hattie Rice Rich, 180

Heart of cold. Bones of cold. Scalp of cold, 204

Her Waking, 37

History, 267

Hot stink of skunk, 286

Hunger, 136

“I Am in Danger—Sir—”, 38

I am trying to imagine, 116

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown, 78

I came out of the hospital like a woman, 206

I can see myself years back at Sunion, 147

I come home from you through the early light of spring, 145

Ideal Landscape, 9

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus, 78

If, says the Dahomeyan devil, 60

If I lay on that beach with you, 151

If these are letters, they will have to be misread, 66

If you have taken this rubble for my past, 224

If Your Name Is on the List, 306

If your name is on the list of judges, 306

I know you are reading this poem, 245

Imagine a city where nothing’s, 292

Implosions, 56

In a bald skull sits our friend in a helmet, 209

In a bookstore on the East Side, 107

In a Classroom, 215

In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice, 63

I needed fox Badly I needed, 303

In my dream, children, 50

In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning, 86

Innocence: 1945, 261

Inscriptions, 265

Integrity, 171

In the Evening, 46

In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood, 40

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand, 224

In the Woods, 31

In Those Years, 253

In those years, people will say, we lost track, 253

It’s happened already while we were still, 263

It was your vision of the pilot, 150

it will not be simple, it will not be long, 250

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming, 143

I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations, 88

I write you this out of another province, 11

Jerusalem, 50

Knight, The, 16

Knot, The, 40

Last night I met you in my sister’s house, 83

Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry, 65

Late Ghazal, 264

Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences, 207

Late night on the underside a spectral glare, 305

Leaflets, 58

Letter from the Land of Sinners, 11

Letters: March 1969, 79

Letters to a Young Poet, 282

Light at a window. Someone up, 118

Like This Together, 34

Little as I knew you I know you: little as you knew me you know me, 265

Living in Sin, 9

Living in the earth-deposits of our history, 135

Living under fire in the rain-colored opal of your love, 268

Look: this is January the worst onslaught, 203

Marghanita, 247

Mary Gravely Jones, 179

Midnight Salvage, 275

Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One, The, 97

Mourning Picture, 39

Movement, 266

My mouth hovers across your breasts, 204

My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion, 75

My swirling wants. Your frozen lips, 84

“Natalya Gorbanevskaya, 54

Natural Resources, 160

Necessities of Life, 29

Newsreel, 87

Night over the great and the little worlds, 206

Night-Pieces: For a Child, 36

Night Watch, 52

1999, 307

Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message, The, 105

Noctilucent Clouds, 305

No flag heavy or full enough to hide this face, 297

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone, 152

North American Time, 197

Nothing he had done before, 302

Not what you thought:  just a turn-off, 254

Novel, The, 215

November 1968, 71

Now, again, every year for years: the life-and-death talk, 53

Obscurity has its tale to tell, 41

Of simple choice they are the villagers; their clothes come with, 87

Often rebuked, yet always back returning, 121

Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean’s light, 266

Old words: trust fidelity, 173

On Edges, 57

Only to have a grief, 22

“Organized knowledge in story and picture,” 15

Orion, 45

Out in this desert we are testing bombs, 93

Out there.  The mind of the river, 72

Over the half-finished houses, 23

Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett, 181

Past the curve where the old craftsman was run down, 278

Peeling Onions, 22

People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering, 76

Piece by piece I seem, 29

Powdered milk, chocolate bars, canned fruit, tea, 261

Power, 135

Planetarium, 73

Prisoners, The, 113

Prospective Immigrants Please Note, 24

Rain on the West Side Highway, 152

Rape, 105

Re-forming the Crystal, 116

Roofwalker, The, 23

Rusted Legacy, 292

Seven Skins, 288

She had thought the studio would keep itself;, 9

She is the one you call sister, 97

She sits with one hand poised against her head, the, 100

Shooting Script, 85

Should I simplify my life for you?, 267

Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time, 144

Sleeping, turning in turn like planets, 149

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 17

Snow Queen, The, 10

Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness, homesickness, lonely retreat, 242

Song, 104

Spirit of Place, The, 181

Stelae, The, 83

Storm Warnings, 3

Stripped, 71

Study of History, 72

Summer in the country, 53

Sunset, December, 1993, 262

Talking of poetry, hauling the books, 215

Tattered Kaddish, 249

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field, 249

That conversation we were always on the edge, 153

That Mouth, 247

“The beauty of it was the guilt, 261

The big star, and that other, 58

The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war, 193

The clouds are electric in this university, 63

The core of the strong hill: not understood:, 160

The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones, 154

The glass has been falling all the afternoon, 3

The moon, 308

Then or Now, 261

The order of the small town on the riverbank, 66

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact, 108

The problem, unstated till now, is how, 208

The red fox, the vixen, 55

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:, 105

There is bracken there is the dark mulberry, 280

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill, 253

The rules break like a thermometer, 149

The tobacco fields lie fallow the migrant pickers, 209

The Tolstoyans  the Afro-American slaves, 211

The trees inside are moving out into the forest, 33

The wing of the osprey lifted, 275

The world’s, 56

They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rocker, 39

This apartment full of books could crack open, 145

This horrible patience which is part of the work, 279

This is the girl’s mouth, the taste, 247

This would not be the war we fought in, 87

Three hours chain-smoking words, 46

Tonight I jerk astart in a dark, 37

Trees, The, 33

Trying to Talk with a Man, 93

Trying to tell you how, 94

Twenty-One Love Poems, 143

Two green-webbed chairs, 216

Two horses in yellow light, 109

Underneath my lids another eye has opened, 96

Under the conditions of my hiring, 276

Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I, 275

Valediction Forbidding Mourning, A, 84

Veterans Day, 297

Violence as purification: the one idea, 207

Virginia 1906, 194

Walk along back of the library, 288

We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to me, 89

We had no petnames, no diminutives for you, 179

We had to take the world as it was given:, 9

We’re not yet out of the everglades, 308

We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation, 85

Whatever happens with us, your body, 150

Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats;, 90

What has happened here will do, 4

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?, 146

What Kind of Times Are These, 253

When I ate and drank liberation once I walked, 278

When my dreams showed signs, 197

When the ice starts to shiver, 57

When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed, 65

When We Dead Awaken, 94

Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads, 225

Wherever in this city, screens flicker, 143

White Night, 118

Wind rocks the car, 34

Winter dream, The, 53

Winter twilight. She comes out of the lab-, 187

Woman Dead in Her Forties, A, 154

You: air-driven reft from the tuber-bitten soil, 210

You cannot eat an egg You don’t know where it’s been, 279

You know the Government must have pushed them to settle, 210

You, once a belle in Shreveport, 17

Your breasts/ sliced-off The scars, 154

Your chunk of lapis-lazuli shoots its stain, 201

Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through, 148

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:, 104

Your photograph won’t do you justice, 282

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live, 147

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—, 146

Your sweetness of soul was a mystery to me, 180

You sleeping I bend to cover, 36

You who think I find words for everything, 208, 211

BY ADRIENNE RICH

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

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

Copyright © 2002 by Adrienne Rich

Copyright © 2001, 1999, 1995, 1991, 1989, 1986, 1984, 1981, 1967, 1963, 1962, 1961, 1960, 1959, 1958, 1957, 1956, 1955, 1954, 1953, 1952, 1951 by Adrienne Rich Copyright © 1978, 1975, 1973, 1971, 1969, 1966 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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

Composition by Julia Druskin

Production manager: Amanda Morrison

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

Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

The fact of a doorframe : selected poems 1950–2001 / Adrienne Rich.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-393-32395-1 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS3535.I233 A6 2002

811’.54—dc21

2002141447

ISBN 978-0-393-24971-2 (e-book)

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

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