ADRIENNE RICH

Your Native Land,

Your Life

POEMS

W.W.NORTON & COMPANY

New York · London

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Contents

I.   Sources

II.   North American Time

For the Record

North American Time

Education of a Novelist

Virginia 1906

Dreams Before Waking

When / Then

Upcountry

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem

In the Wake of Home

What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be

For an Occupant

Emily Carr

Poetry: I, II, III

Baltimore:    a fragment from the Thirties

New York

Homage to Winter

Blue Rock

Yom Kippur 1984

Edges

III   Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1.  Look:     this is January     the worst onslaught

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

3.  My mouth hovers across your breasts

4.  He slammed his hand across my face     and I

5.  She is carrying my madness     and I dread her

6.  Dear Adrienne:      I’m calling you up tonight

7.  Dear Adrienne:      I feel signified by pain

8.  I’m afraid of prison.      Have been all these years.

9.  Tearing but not yet torn:      this page

10. Night     over the great and the little worlds

11. I came out of the hospital like a woman

12. Violence as purification:      the one idea.

13. Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings

14. Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences

15. You who think I find words for everything

16. It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived

17. I have backroads I take     to places

18. The problem, unstated till now, is how

19. If to feel is to be unreliable

20. The tobacco fields lie fallow     the migrant pickers

21. The cat-tails blaze in the corner     sunflowers

22. In a bald skull sits our friend     in a helmet

23. You know the Government must have pushed them to settle

24. Someone said to me:      It’s just that we don’t

25. Did anyone ever know who we were

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

27. The Tolstoyans     the Afro-American slaves

28. This high summer we love will pour its light

29. You who think I find words for everything

Notes

I

Sources

For Helen Smelser

—since 1949—

I

Sixteen years.    The narrow, rough-gullied backroads

almost the same.    The farms:    almost the same,

a new barn here, a new roof there, a rusting car,

collapsed sugar-house, trailer, new young wife

trying to make a lawn instead of a dooryard,

new names, old kinds of names:    Rocquette, Desmarais,

Clark, Pierce, Stone.    Gossier.    No names of mine.

The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5

south of Willoughby:    long dead.    She was an omen

to me, surviving, herding her cubs

in the silvery bend of the road

in nineteen sixty-five.

Shapes of things:    so much the same

they feel like eternal forms:    the house and barn

on the rise above May Pond; the brow of Pisgah;

the face of milkweed blooming,

brookwater pleating over slanted granite,

boletus under pine, the half-composted needles

it broke through patterned on its skin.

Shape of queen anne’s lace, with the drop of blood.

Bladder-campion veined with purple.

Multifoliate heal-all.

II

I refuse to become a seeker for cures.

Everything that has ever

helped me has come through what already

lay stored in me.    Old things, diffuse, unnamed, lie strong

across my heart.

This is from where

my strength comes, even when I miss my strength

even when it turns on me

like a violent master.

III

From where?     the voice asks coldly.

This is the voice in cold morning air

that pierces dreams.     From where does your strength come?

Old things . . .

From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew?

split at the root, raised in a castle of air?

Yes.    I expected this.    I have known for years

the question was coming.        From where

(not from these, surely,

Protestant separatists, Jew-baiters, nightriders

who fired in Irasburg in nineteen-sixty-eight

on a black family newly settled in these hills)

From where

the dew grows thick late August on the fierce green grass

and on the wooden sill and on the stone

the mountains stand in an extraordinary

point of no return    though still are green

collapsed shed-boards gleam like pewter in the dew

the realms of touch-me-not      fiery with tiny tongues

cover the wild ground of the woods

IV

With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

From where does your strength come?

I think somehow, somewhere

every poem of mine must repeat those questions

which are not the same.    There is a whom, a where

that is not chosen    that is given    and sometimes falsely given

in the beginning we grasp whatever we can

to survive

V

All during World War II

I told myself I had some special destiny:

there had to be a reason

I was not living in a bombed-out house

or cellar    hiding out with rats

there had to be a reason

I was growing up safe, American

with sugar rationed in a Mason jar

split at the root    white-skinned social christian

neither gentile nor Jew

through the immense silence

of the Holocaust

I had no idea of what I had been spared

still less of the women and men    my kin

the Jews of Vicksburg or Birmingham

whose lives must have been strategies no less

than the vixen’s on Route 5

VI

If they had played the flute, or chess

I was told    I was not told what they told

their children when the Klan rode

how they might have seen themselves

a chosen people

of shopkeepers

clinging by strategy to a way of life

that had its own uses for them

proud of their length of sojourn in America

deploring the late-comers    the peasants from Russia

I saw my father building

his rootless ideology

his private castle in air

in that most dangerous place, the family home

we were the chosen people

In the beginning we grasp whatever we can

VII

For years I struggled with you:    your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty which came inextricable from your love.    For years all arguments I carried on in my head were with you.    I saw myself, the eldest daughter raised as a son, taught to study but not to pray, taught to hold reading and writing sacred: the eldest daughter in a house with no son, she who must overthrow the father, take what he taught her and use it against him.    All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.

After your death I met you again as the face of patriarchy, could name at last precisely the principle you embodied, there was an ideology at last which let me dispose of you, identify the suffering you caused, hate you righteously as part of a system, the kingdom of the fathers.    I saw the power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had deliberately arranged that it should be invisible to me.     It is only now, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering and deny no part of my own.

VIII

Back there in Maryland the stars

showed liquescent, diffuse

in the breathless summer nights

the constellations melted

I thought I was leaving a place of enervation

heading north where the Drinking Gourd

stood cold and steady at last

pointing the way

I thought I was following a track of freedom

and for awhile it was

IX

Why has my imagination stayed

northeast with the ones who stayed

Are there spirits in me, diaspora-driven

that wanted to lodge somewhere

hooked into the “New” Englanders who hung on

here in this stringent space

believing their Biblical language

their harping on righteousness?

And, myself apart, what was this like for them,

this unlikely growing season

after each winter so mean, so mean

the tying-down of the spirit

and the endless rocks in the soil, the endless

purifications of self

there being no distance, no space around

to experiment with life?

X

These upland farms are the farms

of invaders, these villages

white with rectitude and death

are built on stolen ground

The persecuted, pale with anger

know how to persecute

those who feel destined, under god’s eye

need never ponder difference

and if they kill others for being who they are

or where they are

is this a law of history

or simply, what must change?

XI

If I try to conjure their lives

—who are not my people by any definition—

Yankee Puritans, Québec Catholics

mingled within sight of the Northern Lights

I am forced to conjure a passion

like the tropism in certain plants

bred of a natural region’s

repetitive events

beyond the numb of poverty

christian hypocrisy, isolation

—a passion so unexpected

there is no name for it

so quick, fierce, unconditional

short growing season is no explanation.

XII

And has any of this to do with how

Mohawk or Wampanoag knew it?

is the passion I connect with in this air

trace of the original

existences that knew this place

is the region still trying to speak with them

is this light a language

the shudder of this aspen-grove a way

of sending messages

the white mind barely intercepts

are signals also coming back

from the vast diaspora

of the people who kept their promises

as a way of life?

XIII

Coming back after sixteen years

I stare anew at things

that steeple pure and righteous

that clapboard farmhouse

seeing what I hadn’t seen before

through barnboards, crumbling plaster

decades of old wallpaper roses

clinging to certain studs

—into that dangerous place

the family home:

There are verbal brutalities

borne thereafter like any burn or scar

there are words pulled down from the walls

like dogwhips

the child backed silent against the wall

trying to keep her eyes dry;    haughty;    in panic

I will never let you know

I will never

let you know

XIV

And if my look becomes the bomb that rips

the family home apart

is this betrayal, that the walls

slice off, the staircase shows

torn-away above the street

that the closets where the clothes hung

hang naked, the room the old

grandmother had to sleep in

the toilet on the landing

the room with the books

where the father walks up and down

telling the child to work, work

harder than anyone has worked before?

—But I can’t stop seeing like this

more and more I see like this everywhere.

XV

It’s an oldfashioned, an outrageous thing

to believe one has a “destiny”

—a thought often peculiar to those

who possess privilege—

but there is something else:    the faith

of those despised and endangered

that they are not merely the sum

of damages done to them:

have kept beyond violence the knowledge

arranged in patterns like kente-cloth

unexpected as in batik

recurrent as bitter herbs and unleavened bread

of being a connective link

in a long, continuous way

of ordering hunger, weather, death, desire

and the nearness of chaos.

XVI

The Jews I’ve felt rooted among

are those who were turned to smoke

Reading of the chimneys against the blear air

I think I have seen them myself

the fog of northern Europe licking its way

along the railroad tracks

to the place where all tracks end

You told me not to look there

to become

a citizen of the world

bound by no tribe or clan

yet dying you followed the Six Day War

with desperate attention

and this summer I lie awake at dawn

sweating the Middle East through my brain

wearing the star of David

on a thin chain at my breastbone

XVII

But there was also the other Jew. The one you most feared, the one from the shtetl, from Brooklyn, from the wrong part of history, the wrong accent, the wrong class. The one I left you for.      The one both like and unlike you, who explained you to me for years, who could not explain himself.       The one who said, as if he had memorized the formula, There’s nothing left now but the food and the humor.         The one who, like you, ended isolate, who had tried to move in the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.         Who drove to Vermont in a rented car at dawn and shot himself.         For so many years I had thought you and he were in opposition. I needed your unlikeness then; now it’s your likeness that stares me in the face.       There is something more than food, humor, a turn of phrase, a gesture of the hands:        there is something more.

XVIII

There is something more than self-hatred. That still outlives

these photos of the old Ashkenazi life:

we are gifted children at camp in the country

or orphaned children in kindergarten

we are hurrying along the rare book dealers’ street

with the sunlight striking one side

we are walking the wards of the Jewish hospital

along diagonal squares    young serious nurses

we are part of a family group

formally taken in 1936

with tables, armchairs, ferns

(behind us, in our lives, the muddy street

and the ragged shames

the street-musician, the weavers lined for strike)

we are part of a family wearing white head-bandages

we were beaten in a pogrom

The place where all tracks end

is the place where history was meant to stop

but does not stop    where thinking

was meant to stop but does not stop

where the pattern was meant to give way at last

but only

becomes a different pattern

terrible, threadbare

strained    familiar    on-going

XIX

They say such things are stored

in the genetic code—

half-chances, unresolved

possibilities, the life

passed on because unlived—

a mystic biology?—

I think of the women who sailed to Palestine

years before I was born—

halutzot, pioneers

believing in a new life

socialists, anarchists, jeered

as excitable, sharp of tongue

too filled with life

wanting equality in the promised land

carrying the broken promises

of Zionism in their hearts

along with the broken promises

of communism, anarchism—

makers of miracle who expected miracles

as stubbornly as any housewife does

that the life she gives her life to

shall not be cheap

that the life she gives her life to

shall not turn on her

that the life she gives her life to

shall want an end to suffering

Zion by itself is not enough.

XX

The faithful drudging child

the child at the oak desk whose penmanship,

hard work, style will win her prizes

becomes the woman with a mission, not to win prizes

but to change the laws of history.

How she gets this mission

is not clear, how the boundaries of perfection

explode, leaving her cheekbone grey with smoke

a piece of her hair singed off, her shirt

spattered with earth . . . Say that she grew up in a house

with talk of books, ideal societies—

she is gripped by a blue, a foreign air,

a desert absolute:    dragged by the roots of her own will

into another scene of choices.

XXI

YERUSHALAYIM:    a vault of golden heat

hard-pulsing from bare stones

the desert’s hard-won, delicate green

the diaspora of the stars

thrilling like thousand-year-old locusts

audible yet unheard

a city on a hill

waking with first light to voices

piercing, original, intimate

as if my dreams mixed with the cries

of the oldest, earliest birds

and of all whose wrongs and rights

cry out for explication

as the night pales and one more day

breaks on this Zion of hope and fear

and broken promises

this promised land

XXII

I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me.      It’s been different with my father:      he and I always had a kind of rhetoric going with each other, a battle between us, it didn’t matter if one of us was alive or dead.      But, you, I’ve had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings; letting you dwell in the minds of those who have reason to miss you, in your way, or their way, not mine. The living, writers especially, are terrible projectionists.      I hate the way they use the dead.

Yet I can’t finish this without speaking to you, not simply of you.      You knew there was more left than food and humor.      Even as you said that in 1953 I knew it was a formula you had found, to stand between you and pain.      The deep crevices of black pumpernickel under the knife, the sweet butter and red onions we ate on those slices; the lox and cream cheese on fresh onion rolls; bowls of sour cream mixed with cut radishes, cucumber, scallions; green tomatoes and kosher dill pickles in half-translucent paper; these, you said, were the remnants of the culture, along with the fresh challah which turned stale so fast but looked so beautiful.

That’s why I want to speak to you now.      To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.       There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.      (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.)      I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.

XXIII

Sixteen years ago I sat in this northeast kingdom

reading Gilbert White’s Natural History

of Selborne    thinking

I can never know this land I walk upon

as that English priest knew his

—a comparable piece of earth—

rockledge    soil    insect    bird    weed    tree

I will never know it so well because . . .

Because you have chosen

something else:    to know other things

even the cities which

create of this a myth

Because you grew up in a castle of air

disjunctured

Because without a faith

you are faithful

I have wished I could rest among the beautiful and common weeds I cán name, both here and in other tracts of the globe.    But there is no finite knowing, no such rest.    Innocent birds, deserts, morning-glories, point to choices, leading away from the familiar. When I speak of an end to suffering I don’t mean anesthesia. I mean knowing the world, and my place in it, not in order to stare with bitterness or detachment, but as a powerful and womanly series of choices:    and here I write the words, in their fullness:

powerful;    womanly.

August 1981–

August 1982

II

North American

Time

. . . traigo este calendario.

Sí; aquí se marca el tiempo.

Es almanaque por lo tanto, solo

que es tiempo injusto el que aparace . . .

—Georgina Herrera

(. . . I offer this calendar.

Yes; here time is marked.

It’s an almanac therefore, but

only unjust time appears.)

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

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, Bangladesh, 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

Education of a Novelist

(Italicized lines quoted from Ellen Glasgow’s

autobiography, The Woman Within.)

I

Looking back          trying to decipher

yourself and Lizzie Jones:

We were strange companions, but

that everyone knew us:     a dark

lean, eager colored woman

and a small, pale, eager little girl

roaming together, hand-in-hand

Waking early, Mammy and I

would be dressed before the family had risen

spurred on by an inborn love

of adventure

a vital curiosity

. . . visiting

the neighbors and the neighbors’ cooks and with the neighbors’ maids

sweeping the brick pavement

and the apothecary

and the friendly light-colored letter-carrier

But when you made one visit to the almshouse

“Mammy” was reprimanded

II

I revolted from sentimentality

less because it was false then because

it was cruel . . .

In the country, later

the Black artist spent her genius on the white children

Mammy was with us; we were all happy together

(I revolted from sentimentality    when it suited me)

She would dress us as gypsies, darken

our faces with burnt cork

We would start

on a long journey, telling fortunes

wherever we came to a farm or a Negro cabin

I was always the one who would

think up the most exciting fortunes

(I, too, was always the one)

III

Where or how I learned to read

(you boast so proudly)    I could never

remember        After supper

in front of the fire, undressing by candlelight

Mammy and I would take up and spin out

the story left from the evening before

Nobody ever taught me to read

(Nobody had to,

it was your birthright, Ellen.)

“As soon as I learn my letters,

Mammy, I’m going to teach you yours”

IV

Givens, Ellen. That we’d pick out our way

through the Waverly novels

that our childish, superior fire

was destined for fortune

even though female        deaf       or lame

dewomanized       The growing suspicion

haunting the growing life

the sense of exile in a hostile world

how do we use that?

and for what?

with whom?

Givens.    The pale skin, the eager look, the fact

of having been known

by everyone

our childish, superior fire, and all

I was always the one . . .

Deafness finally drives you

here, there, to specialists in Europe

for hardening of the Eustachian tube

Finding no cure you build

a wall of deceptive gaiety   to shield your pain:

That I, who was winged for flying, should be

wounded and caged!

V

Lizzie Jones vanishes.         Her trace is lost.

She, who was winged for flying

Where at the end

of the nineteenth century    you ask

could one find the Revolution?

In what mean streets and alleys of the South

was it then lying in ambush?    Though I suffered

with the world’s suffering. . . .

“As soon

as I learn my letters, Mammy,

I’m going to teach you yours”

but by your own admission

you never did

Where at the end of the twentieth century

does the Revolution find us

in what streets and alleys, north or south

is it now lying in ambush?

It’s not enough

using your words to damn you, Ellen:

they could have been my own:

this criss-cross

map of kept and broken promises

I was always the one

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 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

Dreams Before Waking

Despair is the question.

—Elie Wiesel

Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo.

—Nancy Morejón

Despair falls:

the shadow of a building

they are raising in the direct path

of your slender ray of sunlight

Slowly the steel girders grow

the skeletal framework rises

yet the western light still filters

through it all

still glances off the plastic sheeting

they wrap around it

for dead of winter

At the end of winter something changes

a faint subtraction

from consolations you expected

an innocent brilliance that does not come

though the flower shops set out

once again on the pavement

their pots of tight-budded sprays

the bunches of jonquils stiff with cold

and at such a price

though someone must buy them

you study those hues as if with hunger

Despair falls

like the day you come home

from work, a summer evening

transparent with rose-blue light

and see they are filling in

the framework

the girders are rising

beyond your window

that seriously you live

in a different place

though you have never moved

and will not move, not yet

but will give away

your potted plants to a friend

on the other side of town

along with the cut crystal flashing

in the window-frame

will forget the evenings

of watching the street, the sky

the planes in the feathered afterglow:

will learn to feel grateful simply for this foothold

where still you can manage

to go on paying rent

where still you can believe

it’s the old neighborhood:

even the woman who sleeps at night

in the barred doorway—wasn’t she always there?

and the man glancing, darting

for food in the supermarket trash—

when did his hunger come to this?

what made the difference?

what will make it for you?

What will make it for you?

You don’t want to know the stages

and those who go through them don’t want to tell

You have your four locks on the door

your savings, your respectable past

your strangely querulous body, suffering

sicknesses of the city no one can name

You have your pride, your bitterness

your memories of sunset

you think you can make it straight through

if you don’t speak of despair.

What would it mean to live

in a city whose people were changing

each other’s despair into hope?—

You yourself must change it.—

what would it feel like to know

your country was changing?—

You yourself must change it.—

Though your life felt arduous

new and unmapped and strange

what would it mean to stand on the first

page of the end of despair?

1983

When/Then

Tell us

how we’ll be together

in that time

patch of sun on a gritty floor; an old newspaper, torn

for toilet paper and coughed-up scum        Don’t talk, she said

when we still love but are no longer young

they bring you a raw purple stick and say

it is one of her fingers;        it could be

Tell us

about aging, what it costs, how women

have loved forty, fifty years

enamel basin, scraped

down to the bare iron        some ashen hairs        red fluid

they say is her blood        how can you

Tell us about the gardens we will keep, the milk

we’ll drink from our own goats

she needs

anti-biotics they say which will be given

when you name names        they show you her fever chart

Tell us about community      the joy

of coming to rest

among women

who will love us

you choose between your community

and her          later others

will come through the cell        not all of them will love you

whichever way you choose

Don’t talk, she said          (you will learn to hear

only her voice when they close in on you)        Don’t talk

Why are you telling us this?

patch of sun on a gritty

floor, bad dreams, a torn newspaper, someone’s blood

in a scraped basin. . . .

1983

Upcountry

The silver shadow        where the line falls grey

and pearly        the unborn villages quivering

under the rock        the snail        travelling the crevice

the furred, flying white insect like a tiny

intelligence lacing the air

this woman whose lips lie parted

after long speech

her white hair unrestrained

All that you never paid

or have with difficulty paid

attention to

Change and be forgiven!      the roots of the forest

muttered        but you tramped through            guilty

unable to take forgiveness        neither do you

give mercy

She is asleep now      dangerous      her mind

slits the air like silk       travels faster than sound

like scissors flung into the next century

Even as you watch for the trout’s hooked stagger

across the lake        the crack of light and the crumpling bear

her mind was on them first

when forgiveness ends

her love means danger

1983

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem

I.

From 1964: a color snapshot:       you

riding a camel past the Great Pyramid

its rough earthy diagonal shouldering

the blue triangle of sky

I know your white shirt        dark skirt        your age

thirty-five        as mine was then

your ignorance like mine

in those years        and your curious mind

throw of your head        bend of your gilt knees

the laugh exchanged with whoever took the picture

I don’t know how you were talking to yourself

I know I was thinking

with a schoolgirl’s ardent rectitude

this will be the deciding year

I am sick of drift

Weren’t we always trying to do better?

Then the voices began to say:    Your plans

are not in the book of plans

written, printed and bound while you

were absent

no, not here nor in Egypt

will you ever catch up

2.

So, then        as if by plan

I turn        and you are lost

How have I lived        knowing

that day of your laugh        so alive/so nothing

even the clothes you wore then

rotted away        How can I live believing

any year can be the deciding year

when I know the book of plans

how it disallows us

time for change        for growing older

truthfully        in our own way

3.

I used to think you ought to be

a woman        in charge        in a desperate time

of whole populations

such seemed the power of your restlessness

I saw you a rescuer

amid huge events        diasporas

scatterings and returnings

I needed this for us

I would have gone to help you

flinging myself into the fray

both of us treading free

of the roads we started on

4.

In the book of plans it is written

that our lifelines shall be episodic

faithless        frayed        lived out

under impure violent rains

and rare but violent sun

It is written there that we may reach

like wan vines across a window

trying to grasp each other

but shall lack care and tending

that water and air shall betray us

that the daughter born a poet

will die of dysentery

while the daughter born to organize

will die of cancer

5.

In the book of plans it says no one

will speak of the book of plans

the appearance will continue

that all this is natural

It says my grief for you is natural

but my anger for us is not

that the image of a white curtain trembling

across a stormy pane

is acceptable        but not

the image I make of you

arm raised hurling       signalling

the squatters        the refugees

storming the food supply

The book of plans says only that you must die

that we all, very soon, must die

6.

Well, I am studying a different book

taking notes wherever I go

the movement of the wrist does not change

but the pen plows deeper

my handwriting flows into words

I have not yet spoken

I’m the sole author of nothing

the book moves from field to field

of testimony       recording

how the wounded teach each other        the old

refuse to be organized

by fools        how the women say

in more than one language        You have struck a rock—

prepare to meet the unplanned

the ignored        the unforeseen        that which breaks

despair        which has always travelled

underground        or in the spaces

between the fixed stars

gazing full-faced        wild

and calm        on the Revolution

7.

Love:     I am studying a different book

and yes, a book is a finite thing

In it your death will never be reversed

the deaths I have witnessed since        never undone

The light drained from the living eyes

can never flash again from those same eyes

I make you no promises

but something’s breaking open here

there were certain extremes we had to know

before we could continue

Call it a book, or not

call it a map of constant travel

Call it a book, or not

call it a song        a ray

of images thrown on a screen

in open lots        in cellars

and among those images

one woman’s meaning to another woman

long after death

in a different world

1983

In the Wake of Home

I.

You sleep in a room with bluegreen curtains

posters        a pile of animals on the bed

A woman and a man who love you

and each other        slip the door ajar

you are almost asleep        they crouch in turn

to stroke your hair        you never wake

This happens every night for years.

This never happened.

2.

Your lips        steady        never say

It should have been this way

That’s not what you say

You        so carefully not asking, Why?

Your eyes        looking straight in mine

remind me of a woman’s

auburn hair        my mother’s hair

but you never saw that hair

The family coil        so twisted, tight and loose

anyone trying to leave

has to strafe the field

burn the premises down

3.

The home houses

mirages        memory fogs the kitchen panes

the rush-hour traffic outside

has the same old ebb and flow

Out on the darkening block

somebody calls you home

night after night        then never again

Useless for you to know

they tried to do what they could

before they left for good

4.

The voice that used to call you home

has gone off on the wind

beaten into thinnest air

whirling down other streets

or maybe the mouth was burnt to ash

maybe the tongue was torn out

brownlung has stolen the breath

or fear has stolen the breath

maybe under another name

it sings on AM radio:

And if you knew, what would you know?

5.

But you will be drawn to places

where generations lie

side by side with each other:

fathers, mothers and children

in the family prayerbook

or the country burying-ground

You will hack your way through the bush

to the Jodensavanne

where the gravestones are black with mould

You will stare at old family albums

with their smiles        their resemblances

You will want to believe that nobody

wandered off        became strange

no woman dropped her baby and ran

no father took off for the hills

no axe splintered the door

—that once at least it was all in order

and nobody came to grief

6.

Anytime you go back

where absence began

the kitchen faucet sticks in a way you know

you have to pull the basement door

in before drawing the bolt

the last porch-step is still loose

the water from the tap

is the old drink of water

Any time you go back

the familiar underpulse

will start its throbbing:      Home, home!

and the hole torn and patched over

will gape unseen again

7.

Even where love has run thin

the child’s soul musters strength

calling on dust-motes        song on the radio

closet-floor of galoshes

stray cat        piles of autumn leaves

whatever comes along

—the rush of purpose to make a life

worth living past abandonment

building the layers up again

over the torn hole        filling in

8.

And what of the stern and faithful aunt

the fierce grandmother        the anxious sister

the good teacher        the one

who stood at the crossing when you had to cross

the woman hired to love you

the skeleton who held out a crust

the breaker of rules        the one

who is neither a man nor a woman        the one

who warmed the liquid vein of life

and day after day whatever the need

handed it on to you?

You who did and had to do

so much for yourself        this was done for you

by someone who did what they could

when others left for good

9.

You imagine an alley        a little kingdom

where the mother-tongue is spoken

a village of shelters        woven

or sewn of hides        in a long-ago way

a shanty standing up

at the edge of sharecropped fields

a tenement where life is seized by the teeth

a farm battened down on snowswept plains

a porch with rubber-plant and glider

on a steep city street

You imagine the people would all be there

fathers mothers and children

the ones you were promised would all be there

eating        arguing        working

trying to get on with life

you imagine this used to be

for everyone        everywhere

10.

What if I told you your home

is this continent of the homeless

of children sold        taken by force

driven from their mothers’ land

killed by their mothers to save from capture

—this continent of changed names and mixed-up blood

of languages tabooed

diasporas unrecorded

undocumented refugees

underground railroads        trails of tears

What if I tell you your home

is this planet of warworn children

women and children standing in line or milling

endlessly calling each others’ names

What if I tell you, you are not different

it’s the family albums that lie

—will any of this comfort you

and how should this comfort you?

11.

The child’s soul carries on

in the wake of home

building a complicated house

a tree-house without a tree

finding places for everything

the song        the stray cat        the skeleton

The child’s soul musters strength

where the holes were torn

but there are no miracles:

even children become exhausted

And how shall they comfort each other

who have come young to grief?

Who will number the grains of loss

and what would comfort be?

1983

What Was, Is;

What Might Have Been, Might Be

What’s kept.    What’s lost.     A snap decision.

Burn the archives.    Let them rot.

Begin by going ten years back.

A woman walks downstairs in a brownstone

in Brooklyn.     Late that night, some other night

snow crystals swarm in her hair

at the place we say, So long.

I’ve lost something.     I’m not sure what it is.

I’m going through my files.

Jewel-weed flashing

blue fire against an iron fence

Her head bent to a mailbox

long fingers ringed in gold     in red-eyed

golden serpents

the autumn sun

burns like a beak off the cars

parked along Riverside        we so deep in talk

in burnt September grass

I’m trying for exactitude

in the files I handle worn and faded labels

And how she drove, and danced, and fought, and worked

and loved, and sang, and hated

dashed into the record store        then out

with the Stevie Wonder        back in the car

flew on

Worn and faded labels . . . This was

our glamor for each other

underlined in bravado

Could it have been another way:

could we have been respectful comrades

parallel warriors        none of that

fast-falling

could we have kept a clean

and decent slate

1984

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

Emily Carr

I try to conjure the kind of joy

you tracked through the wildwoods where the tribes

had set up their poles        what brought you

how by boat, water, wind, you found

yourself facing the one great art

of your native land, your life

All I know is, it is here

even postcard-size can’t diminish

the great eye, nostril, tongue

the wave of the green hills

the darkblue crest of sky        the white

and yellow fog bundled behind the green

You were alone in this

Nobody knew or cared

how to paint the way you saw

or what you saw        Alone

you walked up to the sacred and disregarded

with your canvas, your box of colors

saying Wait for me and the crumbling

totem poles held still

while you sat down on your stool, your knees

spread wide, and let the mist

roll in past your shoulders

bead your rough shawl, your lashes

Wait for me, I have waited so long for you

But you never said that              I

am ashamed to have thought it

You had no personal leanings

You brushed in the final storm-blue stroke

and gave it its name:        Skidegate Pole

1984

Poetry: I

Someone at a table under a brown metal lamp

is studying the history of poetry.

Someone in the library at closing-time

has learned to say modernism,

trope, vatic, text.

She is listening for shreds of music.

He is searching for his name

back in the old country.

They cannot learn without teachers.

They are like us      what we were

if you remember.

In a corner of night a voice

is crying in a kind of whisper:

More!

Can you remember?        when we thought

the poets taught        how to live?

That is not the voice of a critic

nor a common reader

it is someone young      in anger

hardly knowing what to ask

who finds our lines        our glosses

wanting        in this world.

1985

Poetry: II, Chicago

Whatever a poet is

at the point of conception        is

conceived in these projects

of beige and grey bricks        Yes, poets are born

in wasted tracts like these        whatever color, sex

comes to term in this winter’s driving nights

And the child pushes like a spear

a cry        through cracked cement        through zero air

a spear, a cry of green        Yes, poets endure

these schools of fear        balked yet unbroken

where so much gets broken:   trust

windows   pride        the mothertongue

Wherever a poet is born        enduring

depends on the frailest of chances:

Who listened to your murmuring

over your little rubbish        who let you be

who gave you the books

who let you know you were not

alone        showed you the the twist

of old strands        raffia, hemp or silk

the beaded threads        the fiery lines

saying:      This belongs to you        you have the right

you belong to the song

of your mothers and fathers     You have a people

1984

Poetry: III

Even if we knew the children were all asleep

and healthy        the ledgers balanced        the water running

clear in the pipes

and all the prisoners free

Even if every word we wrote by then

were honest       the sheer heft

of our living behind it

not these sometimes

lax, indolent lines

these litanies

Even if we were told          not just by friends

that this was honest work

Even if each of us didn’t wear

a brass locket with a picture

of a strangled woman        a girlchild sewn through the crotch

Even if someone had told us, young:      This is not a key

nor a peacock feather

not a kite nor a telephone

This is the kitchen sink   the grinding-stone

would we give ourselves

more calmly over        feel less criminal joy

when the thing comes        as it does come

clarifying grammar

and the fixed and mutable stars—?

1984

Baltimore:      a fragment from the Thirties

Medical textbooks propped in a dusty window.

Outside, it’s summer.      Heat

swamping stretched awnings, battering dark-green shades.

The Depression, Monument Street,

ice-wagons trailing melt, the Hospital

with its segregated morgues . . .

I’m five years old and trying to be perfect

walking hand-in-hand with my father.

A Black man halts beside us

croaks in a terrible voice, I’m hungry . . .

I’m a lucky child but I’ve read about beggars—

how the good give, the evil turn away.

But I want to turn away.      My father gives.

We walk in silence.      Why did he sound like that?

Is it evil to be frightened?      I want to ask.

He has no roof in his mouth,

my father says at last.

1985

New York

For B. and C.

at your table

telephone rings

every four minutes

talk

of terrible things

the papers bringing

no good news

and burying the worst

Cut-up fruit in cutglass bowls

good for you

French Market coffee

cut with hot milk

crying together

wanting to save this

how we are when we meet

all our banners out

do we deceive each other

do we speak of the dead we sit with

do we mourn in secret

do we taste the sweetness

of life in the center of pain

I wanted to say to you

until the revolution this is happiness

yet was afraid to praise

even with such skeptic turn

of phrase         so shrugged a smile

1985

Homage to Winter

You:      a woman too old

for passive contemplation

caught staring out a window

at bird-of-paradise spikes

jewelled with rain, across an alley

It’s winter in this land

of roses, roses       sometimes

the fog lies thicker around you than your past

sometimes the Pacific radiance

scours the air to lapis

In this new world you feel

backward along the hem of your whole life

questioning every breadth

Nights you can watch the moon shed skin after skin

over and over, always a shape

of imbalance except

at birth and in the full

You, still trying to learn

how to live, what must be done

though in death you will be complete

whatever you do

But death is not the answer.

On these flat green leaves

light skates like a golden blade

high in the dull-green pine

sit two mushroom-colored doves

afterglow overflows

across the bungalow roof

between the signs for the three-way stop

over everything that is:

the cotton pants stirring on the line, the

empty Coke can by the fence

onto the still unflowering

mysterious acacia

and a sudden chill takes the air

Backward you dream to a porch

you stood on a year ago

snow flying quick as thought

sticking to your shoulder        gone

Blue shadows, ridged and fading

on a snow-swept road

the shortest day of the year

Backward you dream to glare ice

and ice-wet pussywillows

to Riverside Drive, the wind

cut loose from Hudson’s Bay

driving tatters into your face

And back you come at last to that room

without a view, where webs of frost

blinded the panes at noon

where already you had begun

to make the visible world your conscience

asking things:      What can you tell me?

what am I doing?      what must I do?

1985

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

Yom Kippur 1984

I drew solitude over me, on the lone shore.

—Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”

For whoever does not afflict his soul throughout

this day, shall be cut off from his people.

—Leviticus 23:29

What is a Jew in solitude?

What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid

far from your own or those you have called your own?

What is a woman in solitude:     a queer woman or man?

In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert

what in this world as it is can solitude mean?

The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs

with its electric gate, its perfected privacy

is not what I mean

the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan

Heights

is not what I mean

the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to

the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her

attack dog suddenly risen

is not what I mean

Three thousand miles from what I once called home

I open a book searching for some lines I remember

about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the

dooryard once

bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,

something that bloomed and faded and was written down

in the poet’s book, forever:

Opening the poet’s book

I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyed

and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have

them

Robinson Jeffers, multitude

is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys

and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines

are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling

its scrolls of surf,

and the separate persons, stooped

over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering

skies of harvest

who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams

Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape,

scour, belong to a brain like no other

Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend

a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final

solution, have I a choice?

To wander far from your own or those you have called your own

to hear strangeness calling you from far away

and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk

to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection

nowhere on your mind

(the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another

Jew

the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street:      Make

those be a woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a

woman’s god)

Find someone like yourself.      Find others.

Agree you will never desert each other.

Understand that any rift among you

means power to those who want to do you in.

Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger.

But I have a nightmare to tell:      I am trying to say

that to be with my people is my dearest wish

but that I also love strangers

that I crave separateness

I hear myself stuttering these words

to my worst friends and my best enemies

who watch for my mistakes in grammar

my mistakes in love.

This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me?

If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud.

To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about

privilege

about drifting from the center, drawn to edges,

a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is,

who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy

river, woman dragged from her stalled car

into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death

young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening

walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing

availing his Blackness

Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion,

the men too holy to touch her hand;      Jew who has

turned her back

on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her

breasts) hiking alone

found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs

(did she die as queer or as Jew?)

Solitude, O taboo, endangered species

on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend

you

In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have:

your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread

her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true

And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away?

have I traded off something I don’t name?

To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist?

What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for

her spirit-vision

far from the protection of those she has called her own?

Will I find O solitude

your plumes, your breasts, your hair

against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s

singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song?

in the old places, anywhere?

What is a Jew in solitude?

What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man?

When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock,

crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide

into the sea

when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger

when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities

crushed together on which the world was founded

when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our

loneliness within the tribes

when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and

forbidden city

when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are

chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in

multitude

in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will

solitude mean?

1984–1985

Edges

In the sleepless sleep of dawn, in the dreamless dream

the kingfisher cuts through        flashing

spirit-fire from his wings        bluer than violet’s edge

the slice of those wings

5 a.m., first light, hoboes of the past

are leaning through the window, what freightcars

did they hop here       I thought I’d left behind?

Their hands are stretched out but not for bread

they are past charity, they want me to hear         their names

Outside in the world where so much is possible

sunrise rekindles and the kingfisher—

the living kingfisher, not that flash of vision—

darts where the creek drags her wetness over stump and stone

where poison oak reddens       acacia pods collect

curled and secretive against the bulkhead

and the firstlight ghosts go transparent

while the homeless line for bread

1985

III

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

4.

He slammed his hand across my face        and I

let him do that until        I stopped letting him do it

so I’m in for life.

. . . . he kept saying I was crazy, he’d lock me up

until I went to Women’s Lib and they

told me he’d been abusing me as much

as if he’d hit me:      emotional abuse.

They told me how to answer back.      That I could

answer back.        But my brother-in-law’s a shrink

with the State.      I have to watch my step.

If I stay just within bounds they can’t come and get me.

Women’s Lib taught me the words to say

to remind myself and him I’m a person with rights

like anyone.        But answering back’s no answer.

5.

She is carrying my madness        and I dread her

avoid her when I can

She walks along I.S. 93        howling

in her bare feet

She is number 6375411

in a cellblock in Arkansas

and I dread what she is paying for        that is mine

She has fallen asleep at last in the battered

women’s safe-house        and I dread

her dreams        that I also dream

If never I become exposed or confined like this

what am I hiding

O sister of nausea        of broken ribs        of isolation

what is this freedom I protect        how is it mine

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

8.

I’m afraid of prison.         Have been all these years.

Afraid they’ll take my aspirin away

and of other things as well:

beatings        damp and cold          I have my fears.

Unable one day to get up and walk

to do what must be done

Prison as idea        it fills me

with fear          this exposure to my own weakness

at someone else’s whim

I watched that woman go over the barbed-wire fence

at the peace encampment

the wheelchair rider

I didn’t want to do what she did

I thought, They’ll get her for this

I thought, We are not such victims.

9.

Tearing but not yet torn:        this page

The long late-winter rage

wild rain on the windshield

clenched stems        unyielding sticks

of maple, birch        bleached grass        the range

of things resisting change

And this is how I am

and this is how you are

when we resist the charmer’s open sesame

the thief’s light-fingered touch

staying closed because we will

not give ourselves away

until the agent        the manipulator        the false toucher

has left        and it is May

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.

13.

Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings,

feelings are always about more than one thing.

You drag yourself back home and it is autumn

you can’t concentrate, you can’t lie on the couch

so you drive yourself for hours on the quiet roads

crying at the wheel         watching the colors

deepening, fading        and winter is coming

and you long for one idea

one simple, huge idea to take this weight

and you know you will never find it, never

because you don’t want to find it

You will drive and cry and come home and eat

and listen to the news

and slowly even at winter’s edge

the feelings come back in their shapes

and colors        conflicting          they come back

they are changed

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?

16.

It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived

watching myself in the act of loss—the art of losing,

Elizabeth Bishop called it, but for me no art

only badly-done exercises

acts of the heart forced to question

its presumptions in this world        its mere excitements

acts of the body forced to measure

all instincts against pain

acts of parting        trying to let go

without giving up        yes     Elizabeth        a city here

a village there        a sister, comrade, cat

and more        no art to this but anger

17.

I have backroads I take        to places

like the hospital where night pain

is never tended enough but I can drive

under the overlacing boughs

of wineglass elm, oak, maple

from Mosquitoville to Wells River

along the double track with the greened hump

the slope with the great sugar-grove

New Age talk calls it “visualizing”        but I know

under torture I would travel

from the West Barnet burying-ground

to Joe’s Brook        by heart        I know

all of those roads by heart

by heart I know what, and all, I have left behind

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

19.

If to feel is to be unreliable

don’t listen to us

if to be in pain is to be predictable

embittered   bullying

then don’t listen to us

If we’re in danger of mistaking

our personal trouble for the pain on the streets

don’t listen to us

if my fury at being grounded frightens you

take off on your racing skis

in your beautiful tinted masks

Trapped in one idea, you can’t have feelings

Without feelings perhaps you can feel like a god

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

21.

The cat-tails blaze in the corner        sunflowers

shed their pale fiery dust        on the dark stove-lid

others stand guard        heads bowed        over the garden

the fierce and flaring garden you have made

out of your woes and expectations

tilled into the earth        I circle close to your mind

crash into it sometimes        as you crash into mine

Given this strip of earth        given mere love

should we not be happy?

but happiness comes and goes as it comes and goes

the safe-house is temporary        the garden

lies open to vandals

this whole valley is one more contradiction

and more will be asked of us        we will ask more

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

24.

Someone said to me:      It’s just that we don’t

know how to cope with the loss of memory.

When your own grandfather doesn’t know you

when your mother thinks you’re somebody else

it’s a terrible thing.

Now just like that is this idea

that the universe will forget us, everything we’ve done

will go nowhere

no one will know who we were.

No one will know who we were!

Not the young who will never        Nor even the old folk

who knew us when we were young        insatiable

for recognition from them

trying so fiercely not to be them

counting on them to know us        anywhere

25.

Did anyone ever know who we were

if we means more than a handful?

flower of a generation       young white men

cut off in the named, commemorated wars

I stare        Jewish        into that loss

for which all names become unspeakable

not ever just the best and brightest

but the most wretched and bedevilled

the obscure        the strange        the driven

the twins        the dwarfs        the geniuses        the gay

But ours was not the only loss

(to whom does annihilation speak

as if for the first time?)

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

28.

This high summer we love will pour its light

the fields grown rich and ragged in one strong moment

then before we’re ready will crash into autumn

with a violence we can’t accept

a bounty we can’t forgive

Night frost will strike when the noons are warm

the pumpkins wildly glowing        the green tomatoes

straining huge on the vines

queen anne and blackeyed susan will straggle rusty

as the milkweed stakes her claim

she who will stand at last        dark sticks barely rising

up through the snow        her testament of continuation

We’ll dream of a longer summer

but this is the one we have:

I lay my sunburnt hand

on your table:        this is the time we have

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

Notes

“Sources”: The phrase “an end to suffering” was evoked by a sentence in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter: “No one knows where the end of suffering will begin.”

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

“Dreams Before Waking”: “Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo” (“Even your country has changed. You yourself have changed it”). These lines, from Morejón’s “Elogio de la Dialéctica,” and Georgina Herrera’s poem “Como Presentaciön, Como Disculpa” can be found in Margaret Randall, ed., Breaking the Silences: Twentieth Century Poetry by Cuban Women (1982). Pulp Press, 3868 MPO, Vancouver, Canada V6B 3Z3.

“One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem: 6”: “Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” Freedom song sung by African women in mass demonstration in Pretoria, 1956, in which 20,000 women gathered to protest the issue of passes to women. See Hilda Bernstein, For Their Triumphs and for Their Tears, International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1975.

“In the Wake of Home: 5”: The Jodensavanne is an abandoned Jewish settlement in Surinam whose ruins exist in a jungle on the Cassipoera River.

“Emily Carr”: Canadian painter (1871–1945). At the height of her powers she painted, with deep respect, the disappearing totem poles of the Northwest Coast Indians. See Doris Shadbolt, The Art of Emily Carr (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979).

“Yom Kippur 1984”: The epigraph and quoted lines from Robinson Jeffers come from The Women at Point Sur and Other Poems (New York: Liveright, 1977).

“Contradictions: 16”: See Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), p. 173.

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

“Contradictions: 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.

Also by Adrienne Rich

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010

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

Poetry & Commitment: An Essay

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2000

Fox: Poems 1998–2000

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

Collected Early Poems 1950–1970

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988

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

Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems

Sources

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

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

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977

Twenty-one Love Poems

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972

The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970

Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968

Necessities of Life

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

The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems

A Change of World

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

A major American poet faces her own native land, her own life, and the result is a volume of compelling, transforming poems. The book includes two extraordinary longer works: the self-exploratory “Sources” and “Contradictions---Tracking Poems,” an ongoing index of an American woman’s life.

The poet writes, “In these poems I have been trying to speak from, and of, and to, my country. To speak a different claim from those staked by the patriots of the sword; to speak of the land itself, the cities, and of the imaginations that have dwelt here, at risk, unfree, assaulted, erased. I believe more than ever that the search for justice and compassion is the great wellspring for poetry in our time, throughout the world, though the theme of despair has been canonized in this century. I draw strength from the traditions of all those who, with every reason to despair, have refused to do so.”

Some of these poems first appeared in the following periodicals: The Boston Review, I-KON, Parnassus, Peace and Freedom, River Styx, San José Studies, and Sojourner. “Sources” was first published as a chapbook by The Heyeck Press, Woodside, California. “Upcountry” and “Poetry: III” were first published as broadsides by The Heyeck Press.

Copyright © 1986 by Adrienne Rich

First published as a Norton paperback 1986; reissued 1993

All rights reserved

The text of this book is composed in Garamond, with

display type set in Centaur. Composition and

Book design by Antonina Krass.

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

Rich, Adrienne.

Your native land, your life.

I. Title

PS3535.I233Y6   1986   811′.54   85-28525

ISBN 978-0-393-31082-5

ISBN 978-0-393-34817-0 (e-book)

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

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd, 10 Coptic Street, London WC1A 1PU

www.wwnorton.com

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Contents

I. Sources

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

II. North American Time

For the Record

North American Time

Education of a Novelist

Virginia 1906

Dreams Before Waking

When/Then

Upcountry

One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem

In the Wake of Home

What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be

For an Occupant

Emily Carr

Poetry: I, II, III

Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties

New York

Homage to Winter

Blue Rock

Yom Kippur 1984

Edges

III Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1. Look: this is January the worst onslaught

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

3. My mouth hovers across your breasts

4. He slammed his hand across my face and I

5. She is carrying my madness and I dread her

6. Dear Adrienne: I’m calling you up tonight

7. Dear Adrienne: I feel signified by pain

8. I’m afraid of prison. Have been all these years.

9. Tearing but not yet torn: this page

10. Night over the great and the little worlds

11. I came out of the hospital like a woman

12. Violence as purification: the one idea.

13. Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings

14. Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences

15. You who think I find words for everything

16. It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived

17. I have backroads I take to places

18. The problem, unstated till now, is how

19. If to feel is to be unreliable

20. The tobacco fields lie fallow the migrant pickers

21. The cat-tails blaze in the corner sunflowers

22. In a bald skull sits our friend in a helmet

23. You know the Government must have pushed them to settle

24. Someone said to me: It’s just that we don’t

25. Did anyone ever know who we were

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

27. The Tolstoyans the Afro-American slaves

28. This high summer we love will pour its light

29. You who think I find words for everything

Notes

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