ADRIENNE RICH

A Wild

Patience Has

Taken Me

This Far

POEMS 1978–1981

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

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

CONTENTS

THE IMAGES

COAST TO COAST

INTEGRITY

CULTURE AND ANARCHY

FOR JULIA IN NEBRASKA

TRANSIT

FOR MEMORY

WHAT IS POSSIBLE

FOR ETHEL ROSENBERG

MOTHER-IN-LAW

HEROINES

GRANDMOTHERS

1. Mary Gravely Jones

2. Hattie Rice Rich

3. Granddaughter

THE SPIRIT OF PLACE

1. Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett

2. The mountain laurel in bloom

3. Strangers are an endangered species

4. The river-fog will do for privacy

5. Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

FRAME

RIFT

A VISION

TURNING THE WHEEL

1. Location

2. Burden Baskets

3. Hohokam

4. Self-hatred

5. Particularity

6. Apparition

7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904

8. Turning the Wheel

NOTES

A Wild

Patience Has

Taken Me

This Far

THE IMAGES

Close to your body, in the

pain of the city

I turn. My hand half-sleeping reaches, finds

some part of you, touch knows you before language

names in the brain. Out in the dark

a howl, police sirens, emergency

our 3 a.m. familiar, ripping the sheath of sleep

registering pure force as if all transpired—

the swell of cruelty and helplessness—

in one block between West End

and Riverside. In my dreams the Hudson

rules the night like a right-hand margin

drawn against the updraft

of burning life, the tongueless cries

of the city. I turn again, slip my arm

under the pillow turned for relief,

your breathing traces my shoulder. Two women sleeping

together have more than their sleep to defend.

And what can reconcile me

that you, the woman whose hand

sensual and protective, brushes me in sleep,

go down each morning into such a city?

I will not, cannot withhold

your body or my own from its chosen danger

but when did we ever choose

to see our bodies strung

in bondage and crucifixion across the exhausted air

when did we choose

to be lynched on the queasy electric signs of

midtown when did we choose

to become the masturbator’s fix

emblem of rape in Riverside Park     the campground

at Bandol     the beach at Sydney?

We are trying to live

in a clearheaded tenderness—

I speak not merely of us, our lives

are “moral and ordinary”

as the lives of numberless women—

I pretend the Hudson is a right-hand margin

drawn against fear and woman-loathing

(water as purification, river as boundary)

but I know my imagination lies:

in the name of freedom of speech

they are lynching us no law is on our side

there are no boundaries

no-man’s-land does not exist.

I can never romanticize language again

never deny its power for disguise for mystification

but the same could be said for music

or any form created

painted ceilings beaten gold worm-worn Pietas

reorganizing victimization     frescoes translating

violence into patterns so powerful and pure

we continually fail to ask are they true for us.

When I walked among time-battered stones

thinking already of you

when I sat neaf the sea

among parched yet flowering weeds

when I drew in my notebook

the thorned purple-tongued flower, each petal

protected by its thorn-leaf

I was mute

innocent of grammar as the waves

irrhythmically washing     I felt washed clean

of the guilt of words     there was no word to read

in the book of that earth     no perjury

the tower of Babel fallen once and for all

light drank at my body

thinking of you I felt free

in the cicadas’ pulse, their encircling praise.

When I saw hér face, she of the several faces

staring     indrawn     in judgment     laughing for joy

her serpents twisting     her arms raised

her breasts gazing

when I looked into hér world

I wished to cry loose my soul

into her, to become

free of speech     at last.

And so I came home     a woman starving

for images

to say my hunger is so old

so fundamental, that all the lost

crumbled     burnt     smashed     shattered     defaced

overpainted     concealed and falsely named

faces of every past we have searched together

in all the ages

could rise     reassemble     re-collect     re-member

themselves as I recollected myself in that presence

as every night close to your body

in the pain of the city, turning

I am remembered by you, remember you

even as we are dismembered

on the cinema screens, the white expensive walls

of collectors, the newsrags blowing the streets

—and it would not be enough.

This is the war of the images.

We are the thorn-leaf guarding the purple-tongued flower

each to each.

1976–1978

COAST TO COAST

There are days when housework seems the only

outlet     old funnel I’ve poured caldrons through

old servitude     In grief and fury bending

to the accustomed tasks     the vacuum cleaner plowing

realms of dust     the mirror scoured     grey webs

behind framed photographs     brushed away

the grey-seamed sky enormous in the west

snow gathering in comers     of the north

Seeing through the prism

you who gave it me

You, bearing ceaselessly

yourself      the witness

Rainbow dissolves the Hudson     This chary, stinting

skin of late winter     ice     forming and breaking up

The unprotected seeing it through

with their ordinary valor

Rainbow composed of ordinary light

February-flat

grey-white of a cheap enamelled pan

breaking into viridian, azure, violet

You write: Three and a half weeks lost from writing. . . .

I think of the word protection

who it is we try to protect     and why

Seeing through the prism     Your face, fog-hollowed     burning

cold of eucalyptus hung with butterflies

lavender of rockbloom

O and your anger uttered in silence word and stammer

shattering the fog     lances of sun

piercing the grey Pacific     unanswerable tide

carving itself in clefts and fissures of the rock

Beauty of your breasts     your hands

turning a stone a shell a weed a prism     in coastal light

traveller and witness

the passion of the speechless

driving your speech

protectless

If you can read and understand this poem

send something back: a burning strand of hair

a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood

a shell

thickened from being battered year on year

send something back.

1978

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

misblotted sunlight, critical light

imperceptibly scalding

the skin these hands will also salve.

1978

CULTURE AND ANARCHY

Leafshade stirring on lichened bark

Daylilies

run wild, “escaped” the botanists call it

from dooryard to meadow to roadside

Life-tingle of angled light

late summer

sharpening toward fall, each year more sharply

This headlong, loved, escaping life

Rainy days at the kitchen table typing,

heaped up letters, a dry moth’s

perfectly mosaiced wings, pamphlets on rape,

forced sterilization, snapshots in color

of an Alabama woman still quilting in her nineties,

The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. . . .

I stained and varnished

the library bookcase today and superintended

the plowing of the orchard. . . .

Fitted out a fugitive slave for Canada

with the help of Harriet Tubman. . . .

The women’s committee failed

to report. I am mortified to death for them. . . .

Washed every window in the house today.

Put a quilted petticoat in the frame.

Commenced Mrs. Browning’s Portuguese

Sonnets. Have just finished

Casa Guidi Windows, a grand poem

and so fitting to our struggle. . . .

To forever blot out slavery is the only

possible compensation for this merciless war. . . .

The all-alone feeling will creep over me. . . .

Upstairs, long silence, then

again, the sudden torrent of your typing

Rough drafts we share, each reading

her own page over the other’s shoulder

trying to see afresh

An energy I cannot even yet

take for granted: picking up a book

of the nineteenth century, reading there the name

of the woman whose book you found

in the old town Athenaeum

beginning to stitch together

Elizabeth Ellet

Elizabeth Barrett

Elizabeth Blackwell

Frances Kemble

Ida B. Wells-Bamett

Susan B. Anthony

On Saturday Mrs. Ford took us to Haworth,

the home of the Brontë sisters. . . .

A most sad day it was to me

as I looked into the little parlor where

the sisters walked up and down

with their arms around each other

and planned their novels. . . .

How much the world of literature has lost

because of their short and ill-environed lives

we can only guess. . . .

Anarchy of August: as if already

autumnal gases glowed in darkness underground

the meadows roughen, grow guttural

with goldenrod, milkweed’s late-summer lilac,

cat-tails, the wild lily brazening,

dooryards overflowing in late, rough-headed

bloom: bushes of orange daisies, purple mallow,

the thistle blazing in her clump of knives,

and the great SUNFLOWER turns

Haze wiping out the hills. Mornings like milk,

the mind wading, treading water, the line of vision blind

the pages of the book cling to the hand

words hang in a suspension

the prism hanging in the windowframe

is blank

A stillness building all day long to thunder

as the weedpod swells and thickens

No one can call this calm

Jane Addams, marking time

in Europe: During most

of that time I was absolutely at sea

so far as any moral purpose was concerned

clinging only to the desire to live

in a really living world

refusing to be content

with a shadowy intellectual

or aesthetic reflection

finally the bursting of the sky

power, release

by sheets by ropes of water, wind

driving before or after

the book laid face-down on the table

spirit travelling the lines of storm

leaping the torrent     all that water

already smelling of earth

Elizabeth Barrett to Anna Jameson:

. . . and is it possible you think

a woman has no business with questions

like the question of slavery?

Then she had better use a pen no more.

She had better subside into slavery

and concubinage herself I think, . . .

and take no rank among thinkers and speakers.

Early dark; still raining; the electricity

out. On the littered table

a transparent globe half-filled

with liquid light, the soaked wick quietly

drinking, turning to flame

that faintly stains the slim glass chimney:

ancient, fragile contrivance

light welling, searching the shadows

Matilda Joslyn Gage; Harriet Tubman;

Ida B. Wells-Barnett; Maria Mitchell;

Anna Howard Shaw; Sojourner Truth;

Elizabeth Cady Stanton; Harriet Hosmer;

Clara Barton; Harriet Beecher Stowe;

Ida Husted Harper; Ernestine Rose

and all those without names

because of their short and ill-environed lives

False dawn. Gossamer tents in wet grass: leaflets

dissolving within hours,

spun of necessity and

leaving no trace

The heavy volumes, calf, with titles in smooth

leather, red and black, gilt letters spelling:

THE HISTORY OF HUMAN SUFFERING

I brush my hand across my eyes

—this is a dream, I think—and read:

THE HISTORY OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE

of a movement

for many years unnoticed

or greatly misrepresented in the public press

its records usually not considered

of sufficient value to be

officially preserved

and conjure up again

THE HISTORY OF HUMAN SUFFERING

like bound back issues of a periodical

stretching for miles

OF HUMAN SUFFERING: borne,

tended, soothed, cauterized,

stanched, cleansed, absorbed, endured

by women

our records usually not considered

of sufficient value to be

officially preserved

The strongest reason

for giving woman all the opportunities

for higher education, for the full

development of her forces of mind and body. . .

the most enlarged freedom of thought and action

a complete emancipation

from all the crippling influences of fear—

is the solitude and personal

responsibility

of her own individual life.

Late afternoon: long silence.

Your notes on yellow foolscap drift on the table

you go down to the garden to pick chard

while the strength is in the leaves

crimson stems veining upward into green

How you have given back to me

my dream of a common language

my solitude of self.

I slice the beetroots to the core,

each one contains a different landscape

of bloodlight filaments, distinct rose-purple

striations like the oldest

strata of a Southwestern canyon

an undiscovered planet laid open in the lens

I should miss you more than any other

living being from this earth. . .

Yes, our work is one,

we are one in aim and sympathy

and we should be together. . . .

1978

FOR JULIA IN NEBRASKA

Here on the divide between the Republican and the Little Blue lived some of the most courageous people of the frontier. Their fortunes and their loves live again in the writings of Willa Cather, daughter of the plains and interpreter of man’s growth in these fields and in the valleys beyond.

On this beautiful, ever-changing land, man fought to establish a home. In her vision of the plow against the sun, symbol of the beauty and importance of work, Willa Cather caught the eternal blending of earth and sky. . . .

In the Midwest of Willa Cather

the railroad looks like a braid of hair

a grandmother’s strong hands plaited

straight down a grand-daughter’s back.

Out there last autumn the streets

dreamed copper-lustre, the fields

of winter wheat whispered long snows yet to fall

we were talking of matrices

and now it’s spring again already.

This stormy Sunday lashed with rain

I call you in Nebraska

hear you’re planting your garden

sanding and oiling a burl of wood

hear in your voice the intention to

survive the long war between mind and body

and we make a promise to talk

this year, about growing older

and I think: we’re making a pledge.

Though not much in books of ritual

is useful between women

we still can make vows together

long distance, in electrical code:

Today you were promising me

to live, and I took your word,

Julia, as if it were my own:

we’ll live to grow old and talk about it too.

I’ve listened to your words

seen you stand by the caldron’s glare

rendering grammar by the heat

of your womanly wrath.

Brave linguist, bearing your double axe and shield

painfully honed and polished,

no word lies cool on your tongue

bent on restoring meaning to

our lesbian names, in quiet fury

weaving the chronicle so violently torn.

On this beautiful, ever-changing land

—the historical marker says—

man fought to establish a home

(fought whom? the marker is mute.)

They named this Catherland, for Willa Cather,

lesbian—the marker is mute,

the marker white men set on a soil

of broken treaties, Indian blood,

women wiped out in childbirths, massacres—

for Willa Cather, lesbian,

whose letters were burnt in shame.

Dear Julia, Willa knew at her death

that the very air was changing

that her Archbishop’s skies

would hardly survive his life

she knew as well that history

is neither your script nor mine

it is the pictograph

from which the young must learn

like Tom Outland, from people

discredited or dead

that it needs a telling as plain

as the prairie, as the tale

of a young girl or an old woman

told by tongues that loved them

And Willa who could not tell

her own story as it was

left us her stem and delicate

respect for the lives she loved—

How are we going to do better?

for that’s the question that lies

beyond our excavations,

the question I ask of you

and myself, when our maps diverge,

when we miss signals, fail—

And if I’ve written in passion,

Live, Julia! what was I writing

but my own pledge to myself

where the love of women is rooted?

And what was I invoking

but the matrices we weave

web upon web, delicate rafters

flung in audacity to the prairie skies

nets of telepathy contrived

to outlast the iron road

laid out in blood across the land they called virgin—

nets, strands, a braid of hair

a grandmother’s strong hands plaited

straight down a grand-daughter’s back.

1978, 1981

TRANSIT

When I meet the skier she is always

walking, skis and poles shouldered, toward the mountain

free-swinging in worn boots

over the path new-sifted with fresh snow

her greying dark hair almost hidden by

a cap of many colors

her fifty-year-old, strong, impatient body

dressed for cold and speed

her eyes level with mine

And when we pass each other I look into her face

wondering what we have in common

where our minds converge

for we do not pass each other, she passes me

as I halt beside the fence tangled in snow,

she passes me as I shall never pass her

in this life

Yet I remember us together

climbing Chocorua, summer nineteen-forty-five

details of vegetation beyond the timberline

lichens, wildflowers, birds,

amazement when the trail broke out onto the granite ledge

sloped over blue lakes, green pines, giddy air

like dreams of flying

When sisters separate they haunt each other

as she, who I might once have been, haunts me

or is it I who do the haunting

halting and watching on the path

how she appears again through lightly-blowing

crystals, how her strong knees carry her,

how unaware she is, how simple

this is for her, how without let or hindrance

she travels in her body

until the point of passing, where the skier

and the cripple must decide

to recognize each other?

1979

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

WHAT IS POSSIBLE

A clear night     if the mind were clear

If the mind were simple, if the mind were bare

of all but the most classic necessities:

wooden spoon     knife     mirror

cup     lamp     chisel

a comb passing through hair beside a window

a sheet

thrown back by the sleeper

A clear night in which two planets

seem to clasp each other     in which the earthly grasses

shift like silk in starlight

If the mind were clear

and if the mind were simple     you could take this mind

this particular state     and say

This is how I would live if I could choose:

this is what is possible

A clear night.     But the mind

of the woman imagining all this     the mind

that allows all this to be possible

is not clear as the night

is never simple     cannot clasp

its truths as the transiting planets clasp each other

does not so easily

work free from remorse

does not so easily

manage the miracle

for which mind is famous

or used to be famous

does not at will become abstract and pure

this woman’s mind

does not even will that miracle

having a different mission

in the universe

If the mind were simple     if the mind were bare

it might resemble a room     a swept interior

but how could this now be possible

given the voices of the ghost-towns

their tiny and vast configurations

needing to be deciphered

the oracular night

with its densely working sounds

If it could ever come down to anything like

a comb passing through hair beside a window

no more than that

a sheet

thrown back by the sleeper

but the mind

of the woman thinking this     is wrapped in battle

is on another mission

a stalk of grass     dried feathery weed     rooted in snow

in frozen air stirring     a fierce wand graphing

Her finger also tracing

pages of a book

knowing better than the poem she reads

knowing through the poem

through ice-feathered panes

the winter

flexing its talons

the hawk-wind

poised to kill

1980

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

MOTHER-IN-LAW

Tell me something

you say

Not: What are you working on now, is there anyone special,

how is the job

do you mind coming back to an empty house

what do you do on Sundays

Tell me something . . .

Some secret

we both know and have never spoken?

Some sentence that could flood with light

your life, mine?

Tell me what daughters tell their mothers

everywhere in the world, and I and only I

even have to ask. . . .

Tell me something.

Lately, I hear it: Tell me something true,

daughter-in-law, before we part,

tell me something true before I die

And time was when I tried.

You married my son, and so

strange as you are, you’re my daughter

Tell me. . . .

I’ve been trying to tell you, mother-in-law

that I think I’m breaking in two

and half of me doesn’t even want to love

I can polish this table to satin because I don’t care

I am trying to tell you, I envy

the people in mental hospitals their freedom

and I can’t live on placebos

or Valium, like you

A cut lemon scours the smell of fish away

You’ll feel better when the children are in school

I would try to tell you, mother-in-law

but my anger takes fire from yours and in the oven

the meal bursts into flames

Daughter-in-law, before we part

tell me something true

I polished the table, mother-in-law

and scrubbed the knives with half a lemon

the way you showed me to do

I wish I could tell you—

Tell me!

They think I’m weak and hold

things back from me. I agreed to this years ago.

Daughter-in-law, strange as you are,

tell me something true

tell me something

Your son is dead

ten years, I am a lesbian,

my children are themselves.

Mother-in-law, before we part

shall we try again? Strange as I am,

strange as you are? What do mothers

ask their own daughters, everywhere in the world?

Is there a question?

Ask me something.

1980

HEROINES

Exceptional

even deviant

you draw your long skirts

across the nineteenth century

Your mind

burns long after death

not like the harbor beacon

but like a pyre of driftwood

on the beach

You are spared

illiteracy

death by pneumonia

teeth which leave the gums

the seamstress’ clouded eyes

the mill-girl’s shortening breath

by a collection

of circumstances

soon to be known as

class privilege

The law says you can possess nothing

in a world

where property is everything

You belong first to your father

then to him who

chooses you

if you fail to marry

you are without recourse

unable to earn

a working man’s salary

forbidden to vote

forbidden to speak

in public

if married you are legally dead

the law says

you may not bequeath property

save to your children

or male kin

that your husband

has the right

of the slaveholder

to hunt down and re-possess you

should you escape

You may inherit slaves

but have no power to free them

your skin is fair

you have been taught that light

came

to the Dark Continent

with white power

that the Indians

live in filth

and occult animal rites

Your mother wore corsets

to choke her spirit

which if you refuse

you are jeered for refusing

you have heard many sermons

and have carried

your own interpretations

locked in your heart

You are a woman

strong in health

through a collection

of circumstances

soon to be known

as class privilege

which if you break

the social compact

you lose outright

When you open your mouth in public

human excrement

is flung at you

you are exceptional

in personal circumstance

in indignation

you give up believing

in protection

in Scripture

in man-made laws

respectable as you look

you are an outlaw

Your mind bums

not like the harbor beacon

but like a fire

of fiercer origin

you begin speaking out

and a great gust of freedom

rushes in with your words

yet still you speak

in the shattered language

of a partial vision

You draw your long skirts

deviant

across the nineteenth century

registering injustice

failing to make it whole

How can I fail to love

your clarity and fury

how can I give you

all your due

take courage from your courage

honor your exact

legacy as it is

recognizing

as well

that it is not enough?

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 many 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

RIFT

I have in my head some images of you:

your face turned awkwardly from the kiss of greeting

the sparkle of your eyes in the dark car, driving

your beautiful fingers reaching for

a glass of water.

Also your lip curling

at what displeases you, the sign of closure,

the fending-off, the clouding-over.

Politics,

you’d say, is an unworthy name

for what we’re after.

What we’re after

is not that clear to me, if politics

is an unworthy name.

When language fails us, when we fail each other

there is no exorcism. The hurt continues. Yes, your scorn

turns up the jet of my anger. Yes, I find you

overweening, obsessed, and even in your genius

narrow-minded—I could list much more—

and absolute loyalty was never in my line

once having left it in my father’s house—

but as I go on sorting images of you

my hand trembles, and I try

to train it not to tremble.

1980

A VISION

(thinking of Simone Weil)

You. There, with your gazing eyes

Your blazing eyes

A hand or something passes across the sun. Your eyeballs slacken,

you are free for a moment. Then it comes back: this

test of the capacity to keep in focus

this

unfair struggle with the forces of perception

this enforced

(but at that word your attention changes)

this enforced     loss of self

in a greater thing of course, who has ever

lost herself in something smaller?

You with your cornea and iris and their power

you with your stubborn lids that have stayed open

at the moment of pouring liquid steel

you with your fear of blinding

Here it is. I am writing this almost

involuntarily on a bad, a junky typewriter that skips

and slides the text

Still these are mechanical problems, writing to you

is another kind of problem

and even so the words create themselves

What is your own will that it

can so transfix you

why are you forced to take this test

over and over and call it God

why not call it you and get it over

you with your hatred of enforcement

and your fear of blinding?

1981

TURNING THE WHEEL

1. Location

No room for nostalgia here. What would it look like?

The imitation of a ghost mining town,

the movie-set façade of a false Spanish

arcade, the faceless pueblo

with the usual faceless old woman grinding corn?

It’s all been done. Acre on acre

of film locations disguised as Sears,

Safeway, the Desert National Bank,

Fashion Mall, Sun Valley Waterbeds.

Old people, rich, pass on in cloistered stucco

tiled and with fountains; poor, at Golden Acres

Trailer Ranch for Adult Seniors, at the edge of town,

close by the Reassembled Church of Latter-Day

Saints and a dozen motels called Mountain View.

The mountains are on view from everywhere

in this desert: this poor, conquered, bulldozed desert

overridden like a hold-out

enemy village. Nostalgia for the desert

will soon draw you to the Desert Museum

or off on an unpaved track to stare at one saguaro

—velvety, pleated, from a distance graceful—

closer-on, shot through with bullet holes

and seeming to give the finger to it all.

2. Burden Baskets

False history gets made all day, any day,

the truth of the new is never on the news

False history gets written every day

and by some who should know better:

the lesbian archaeologist watches herself

sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,

asking the clay all questions but her own.

Yet suddenly for once the standard version

splits open to something shocking, unintentional.

In the elegant Southwest Museum, no trace of bloodshed

or broken treaty. But, behind glass, these baskets

woven for the young women’s puberty dances

still performed among the still surviving

Apache people;     filled with offerings:

cans of diet Pepsi, peanut brittle,

Cracker Jack, Hershey bars

piled there, behind glass, without notation

in the anthropologist’s typewritten text

which like a patient voice tired of explaining

goes on to explain a different method of weaving.

3. Hohokam

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around.

I try to pierce through to a prehistoric culture

the museum says were known as those who have ceased.

I try to imagine them, before the Hopi

or Navaho, those who have ceased

but they draw back, an archetypal blur.

Did they leave behind for Pima or Navaho

something most precious, now archaic,

more than a faceless woman grinding corn?

Those who have ceased is amnesia-language:

no more to be said of them. Nobody wants

to see their faces or hear what they were about.

I try to imagine a desert-shamaness

bringing water to fields of squash, maize and cotton

but where the desert herself is half-eroded

half-flooded by a million jets of spray

to conjure a rich white man’s paradise

the shamaness could well have withdrawn her ghost.

4. Self-hatred

In Colcha embroidery, I learn,

women use ravelled yarn from old wool blankets

to trace out scenes on homespun woollen sacks—

our ancient art of making out of nothing—

or is it making the old life serve the new?

The impact of Christian culture, it is written,

and other influences, have changed the patterns.

(Once they were birds perhaps, I think; or serpents.)

Example: here we have a scene of flagellants,

each whip is accurately self-directed.

To understand colonization is taking me

years. I stuck my loaded needle

into the coarse squares of the sack, I smoothed

the stylized pattern on my knee with pride.

I also heard them say my own designs

were childlike, primitive, obscene.

What rivets me to history is seeing

arts of survival turned

to rituals of self-hatred. This

is colonization. Unborn sisters,

look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves,

see us not one-dimensional but with

the past as your steadying and corrective lens.

5. Particularity

In search of the desert witch, the shamaness

forget the archetypes, forget the dark

and lithic profile, do not scan the clouds

massed on the horizon, violet and green,

for her icon, do not pursue

the ready-made abstraction, do not peer for symbols.

So long as you want her faceless, without smell

or voice, so long as she does not squat

to urinate, or scratch herself, so long

as she does not snore beneath her blanket

or grimace as she grasps the stone-cold

grinding stone at dawn

so long as she does not have her own peculiar

face, slightly wall-eyed or with a streak

of topaz lightning in the blackness

of one eye, so long as she does not limp

so long as you try to simplify her meaning

so long as she merely symbolizes power

she is kept helpless and conventional

her true power routed backward

into the past, we cannot touch or name her

and, barred from participation by those who need her

she stifles in unspeakable loneliness.

6. Apparition

If she appears, hands ringed with rings

you have dreamed about, if on her large fingers

jasper and sardonyx and agate smolder

if she is wearing shawls woven in fire

and blood, if she is wearing shawls

of undyed fiber, yellowish

if on her neck are hung

obsidian and silver, silver and turquoise

if she comes skirted like a Christian

her hair combed back by missionary fingers

if she sits offering her treasure by the road

to spare a brother’s or an uncle’s dignity

or if she sits pretending

to weave or grind or do some other thing

for the appeasement of the ignorant

if she is the famous potter

whose name confers honor on certain vessels

if she is wrist-deep in mud and shawled in dust

and wholly anonymous

look at her closely if you dare

do not assume you know those cheekbones

or those eye-sockets; or that still-bristling hair.

7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904

My dear Mother and Sister:

I have been asked

to design a building in the Hopi style

at the Grand Canyon. As you know

in all my travels for Mr. Harvey

and the Santa Fe Railroad, I have thought this the greatest

sight in the Southwest—in our land entire.

I am here already, trying to make a start.

I cannot tell you with what elation

this commission has filled me. I regret to say

it will mean I cannot come home to St. Paul

as I hoped, this spring. I am hoping this may lead

to other projects here, of equal grandeur.

(Do you understand? I want this glory,

I want to place my own conception

and that of the Indians whose land this was

at the edge of this incommensurable thing.)

I know my life seems shaky, unreliable

to you. When this is finished I promise you

to come home to St. Paul and teach. You will never lack

for what I can give you. Your affectionate

daughter and sister,

Mary.

8. Turning the Wheel

The road to the great canyon always feels

like that road and no other

the highway to a fissure     to the female core

of a continent

Below Flagstaff even     the rock erosions wear

a famous handwriting

the river’s still prevailing signature

Seeing those rocks     that road     in dreams     I know

it is happening again     as twice while waking

I am travelling to the edge     to meet the face

of annihilating and impersonal time

stained in the colors of a woman’s genitals

outlasting every transient violation

a face that is strangely intimate to me

Today I turned the wheel     refused that journey

I was feeling too alone on the open plateau

of piñon juniper     world beyond time

of rockflank spread around me     too alone

and too filled with you     with whom I talked for hours

driving up from the desert     though you were far away

as I talk to you all day     whatever day

1981

NOTES

“The Images”: The phrase “moral and ordinary” is echoed from Blanche Wiesen Cook’s essay “Female Support Networks and Political Activism” in her pamphlet Women and Support Networks (Brooklyn: Out & Out Books, 1979).

“Integrity”: To my knowledge, this word was first introduced in a feminist context by Janice Raymond in her essay “The Illusion of Androgyny,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 2, no. 1 (Summer 1975).

“Culture and Anarchy”: The title is stolen from Matthew Arnold’s collection of essays by the same name, first published in London, 1869. The sources for the voices of nineteenth-century women heard in this poem are as follows: Diaries of Susan B. Anthony, 1861; letter from Anthony to her sister, 1883, both from Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Indianapolis and Kansas City: Bowen-Merrill, 1899); Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1926); Elizabeth Barrett-Browning, letter to Anna Brownell Jameson, 1852, in Frederick Kenyon, ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (New York: Macmillan, 1898), vol. 2; Ida Husted Harper, introduction to Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage (1902), vol. 4; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech “On Solitude of Self,” in Anthony and Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, letter to Susan B. Anthony, in Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. i.

“For Julia in Nebraska”: Epigraph quoted from the Willa Cather Educational Foundation, Historical Landmark Council, marker at the intersection of Highways 281 and 4, fourteen miles north of Red Cloud, Nebraska.

“For Ethel Rosenberg”: Phrases italicized in section 3, line 6, are from Robert Coover’s novel, The Public Burning of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (New York: Viking, 1977).

“Mother-in-Law”: It has been suggested to me that the lines “I am trying to tell you, I envy/the people in mental hospitals their freedom” add to a stockpile of false images of mental patients’ incarceration—images which help perpetuate their pain and the system which routinely drugs, curbs, “constrains,” electroshocks, and surgically experiments on them. The woman speaking in the poem speaks, of course, out of her own frustration and despair, the lines are bitterly ironic; but I agree with my critics that in a world eager both to romanticize and to torture mental patients, such cliches must be used, if at all, with utmost concern for the realities underlying them.

“Heroines”: See Gerda Lerner: “The history of notable women is the history of exceptional, even deviant women, and does not describe the experience and history of the mass of women” (“Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges, ” in Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979]).

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

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

“Turning the Wheel: 3”: The Hohokam were a prehistoric farming culture who developed irrigation canals in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico between about 300 B.C. and A.D. 1400. The word Hohokam is Pima and is translated variously as “those who have ceased ” or “those who were used up. ” See Emil W. Haury, The Hohokam, Desert Farmers and Craftsmen (sic) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976).

“Turning the Wheel: 7”: The letter is a poetic fiction, based on a reading of Virginia Grattan, Mary Colter, Builder upon the Red Earth (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1980). Mary E. J. Colter (1869–1958) studied design and architecture in order to support her mother and younger sister upon her father’s death. She taught art in a St. Paul, Minnesota, high school for fifteen years before starting to work as a decorator for the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad. Soon she was completely in charge of both exterior and interior design of hotels and restaurants from Chicago westward. Her work advanced the movement away from Victorian style toward a more indigenous southwestern and western architecture. At the height of her career she designed eight major buildings at the Grand Canyon, all of which are still standing. She never married. She drew consistently on Native American arts and design in her work, and her collection of Hopi and Navaho art can be seen at Mesa Verde Museum. Colter’s life work—a remarkable accomplishment for a woman architect—was thus inextricable from the violation and expropriation of Native culture by white entrepreneurs. Yet her love for that culture was lifelong.

“We are in the presence here of a major American poet whose voice at mid-century in her own life is increasingly marked by moral passion.”

New York Times Book Review

“In this collection, Ms. Rich has shown both a deep knowledge of her subject, women, and a fine mastery of her craft, timeless contemporary poetry. Above all, she has not abandoned the struggle of ‘trying to live/in a clear-headed tenderness’ and translating her efforts into critical signposts for those who follow.”

Kansas City Star

“A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far is . . . a volume of remarkable maturity and strength.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“Produced in mid-life over a three-year period, the poems express a vision which has reached fullness, a continuation of the clarity attained in The Dream of a Common Language.”

Los Angeles Times

BY ADRIENNE RICH

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

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 1979–1986

Your Native Land, Your Life

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

Sources

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

The Dream of a Common Language

Twenty-one Love Poems

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

Diving into the Wreck

The Will to Change

Leaflets

Necessities of Life

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

The Diamond Cutters

A Change of World

Among Adrienne Rich’s most recent honors is the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry for An Atlas of the Difficult World. Her other honors include a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal, the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Silver Medal for 1992 (co-winner), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, a National Institute of Arts and Letters award, and the 1992 William Whitehead Award for lifetime achievement.

Adrienne Rich’s Collected Early Poems 1950–1970 was published in 1993.

Some of these poems were originally published in the following journals: Conditions, Heresies, Iowa Review, Maenad, Massachusetts Review, Sinister Wisdom.

Copyright © 1981 by Adrienne Rich

Norton paperback reissue 1993

All Rights Reserved

Book design by Antonina Krass

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

Rich, Adrienne.

A wild patience has taken me this far: Poems 1978–1981.

Contents: The images—Coast to coast—

Integrity—[etc.]

I. Title.

PS3535.I233W48 1981 811’.54 81–4382

ISBN 0-393-31037-X

ISBN 978-0-393-34815-6 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

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

Table of Contents

Title

Contents

The Images

Coast To Coast

Integrity

Culture and Anarchy

For Julia in Nebraska

Transit

For Memory

What IS Possible

For Ethel Rosenberg

Mother-in-Law

Heroines

Grandmothers

1. Mary Gravely Jones

2. Hattie Rice Rich

3. Granddaughter

The Spirit of Place

1. Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett

2. The mountain laurel in bloom

3. Strangers are an endangered species

4. The river-fog will do for privacy

5. Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

Frame

Rift

A Vision

Turning the Wheel

1. Location

2. Burden Baskets

3. Hohokam

4. Self-hatred

5. Particularity

6. Apparition

7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904

8. Turning the Wheel

Notes

Praise for A WILD PATIENCE HAS TAKEN ME THIS FAR

Also by Adrienne Rich

About the Author

Copyright