TONIGHT

NO POETRY

WILL SERVE

ALSO BY ADRIENNE RICH

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

Poetry & Commitment: An Essay

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

TONIGHT

NO POETRY

WILL SERVE

POEMS 2007–2010

ADRIENNE RICH

SERVE (v.t.):

to work for, be a servant to;

to give obedience and reverent honor to;

to fight for; do military or naval service for;

to go through or spend (a term of imprisonment);

to meet the needs of or satisfy the requirements of, be used by;

to deliver (a legal document) as a summons

—Webster’s New World Dictionary

of the American Language (1964)

Contents

I

Waiting for Rain, for Music

Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time

Benjamin Revisited

Innocence

Domain

Fracture

Turbulence

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

II

Scenes of Negotiation

III

From Sickbed Shores

IV

Axel Avákar

Axel Avákar

Axel: backstory

Axel, in thunder

I was there, Axel

Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

V

Ballade of the Poverties

Emergency Clinic

Confrontations

Circum/Stances

Winterface

Quarto

Don’t Flinch

Black Locket

Generosity

VI

You, Again

Powers of Recuperation

Notes on the Poems

Acknowledgments

I

Waiting for Rain, for Music

Burn me some music   Send my roots rain   I’m swept

dry from inside Hard winds rack my core

A struggle at the roots of the mind   Whoever said

it would go on and on like this

Straphanger swaying inside a runaway car

palming a notebook scribbled in

contraband calligraphy   against the war

poetry wages against itself

Once under a shed’s eaves

thunder drumming membrane of afternoon

electric scissors slitting the air

thick drops spattering few and far

we could smell it then a long way off

But where’s the rain coming to soak this soil

Burn me some music   There’s a tune

“Neglect of Sorrow”

I’ve heard it hummed or strummed

my whole life long

in many a corridor

waiting for tomorrow

long after tomorrow

should’ve come

on many an ear it should have fallen

but the bands were playing so loud

2007

Reading the Iliad (As If) for

the First Time

Lurid, garish, gash

rended creature struggles to rise, to

run with dripping belly

Blood making everything more real

pounds in the spearthruster’s arm as in

the gunman’s neck the offhand

moment—Now!—before he

takes the bastards out

Splendor in black and ochre on a grecian urn

Beauty as truth

The sea as background

stricken with black long-oared ships

on shore chariots shields greaved muscled legs

horses rearing   Beauty!   flesh before gangrene

Mind-shifting gods rush back and forth   Delusion

a daughter seized by the hair   swung out to bewilder men

Everything here is conflictual and is called man’s fate

Ugly glory: open-eyed wounds

feed enormous flies

Hoofs slicken on bloodglaze

Horses turn away their heads

weeping equine tears

Beauty?

a wall with names of the fallen

from both sides   passionate objectivity

2009

Benjamin Revisited

The angel

of history is

flown

now meet the janitor

down

in the basement   who

shirtless   smoking

has the job of stoking

the so-called past

into the so-called present

2007

Innocence

… thought, think, I did

some terrible

thing back then

—thing that left traces

all over you

your work / how your figure

pressed into the world ?

Had you murdered

—or not—something if not

someone Had blindly—or not—

followed custom needing to be

broken Broken

—or not—with custom

needing to be kept ?

Something—a body—still

spins in air a weaving weight

a scorching

However it was done

And the folks disassembling

from under the tree

after you snapped the picture

saliva thick in your mouth

Disfigured sequel:

confederations of the progeny

cottaged along these roads

front-center colonials

shrubbery lights in blue

and silver

crèche on the judge’s lawn O the dear baby

People craving in their mouths

warm milk over soft white bread

2007

Domain

i

A girl looks through a microscope her father’s

showing her life

in a drop of water or

finger blood smeared onto a glass wafer

Later leaning head on hand

while the sound of scales being practiced

clambers bleakly, adamantly up the stairs

she reads her own handwriting

Neighbors don’t meet on the corner here

the child whose parents aren’t home is not offered a meal

the congressman’s wife who wears nothing but green

tramples through unraked oak leaves yelling

to her strayed dogs Hey Rex! Hey Roy!

Husband in Washington: 1944

The girl finding her method: you want friends

you’re going to have to write

letters to strangers

ii

A coffee stain splashed on a desk: her accident her

mistake her true

country: wavy brown coastline upland

silken reeds swayed by long lectures of the wind

From the shore small boats reach, depart, return

the never-leavers tie nets of dried seaweed weighted

with tumbled-down stones

instructing young fingers through difficult knots

guiding, scraping some young fingers

No sound carries far from here

Rebuked, utopian projection

she visits rarely trying to keep

interior root systems, milky

nipples of stars, airborne wings rushing over

refuge of missing parts

intact

2008

Fracture

When on that transatlantic call into the unseen

ear of a hack through whiskey film you blabbed

your misanthrope’s

misremembered remnant of a story

given years back in trust

a rearview mirror

cracked /

shock of an ice-cube biting liquid

Heard the sound / didn’t know yet

where it was coming from

That mirror / gave up our ghosts

This fine clear summer morning / a line from Chekhov:

it would be strange not to forgive

(I in body now alive)

All are human / give / forgive

drop the charges / let go / put away

Rage for the trusting

it would be strange not to say

Love? yes

in this lifted hand / behind

these eyes

upon you / now

2007

Turbulence

There’ll be turbulence.   You’ll drop

your book to hold your

water bottle steady.   Your

mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall

may who ne’er hung there let him

watch the movie.   The plane’s

supposed to shudder, shoulder on

like this.   It’s built to do that. You’re

designed to tremble too.   Else break

Higher you climb, trouble in mind

lungs labor, heights hurl vistas

Oxygen hangs ready

overhead.   In the event put on

the child’s mask first.   Breathe normally

2007

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Saw you walking barefoot

taking a long look

at the new moon’s eyelid

later spread

sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair

asleep but not oblivious

of the unslept unsleeping

elsewhere

Tonight I think

no poetry

will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane

adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun

submerges the subject

noun is choking

verb disgraced goes on doing

now diagram the sentence

2007

II

Scenes of Negotiation

Z: I hated that job but You’d have taken it too if you’d had a family

Y: Pretty filthy and dangerous though wasn’t it?

Z: Those years, one bad move, you were down on your knees begging for work

Zz: If you’d had a family! Who’d you think we were, just people standing around?

Yy: Filthy and dangerous like the streets I worked before you ever met me?

Zz: Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?

Hired guards shove metal barriers through plate glass, then prod the first line of protestors in through the fanged opening. Video and cellphone cameras devouring it all. Sucked in and blurted worldwide: “Peace” Rally Turns Violent

Protestors, a mixed bunch, end up in different holding cells where they won’t see each other again

Being or doing: you’re taken in for either, or both. Who you were born as, what or who you chose or became. Facing moral disorder head-on, some for the first time, on behalf of others. Delusion of inalienable rights. Others who’ve known the score all along

Some bailed-out go back to the scene. Some go home to sleep. Others, it’s months in solitary mouthing dialogues with nobody. Imagining social presence. Fending off, getting ready for the social absence called death

This isn’t much more than a shed on two-by-fours over the water. Uncaulked. Someone’s romantic hideaway. We’ve been here awhile, like it well enough. The tide retches over rocks below. Wind coming up now. We liked it better when the others were still here. They went off in different directions. Patrol boats gathered some in, we saw the lights and heard the megaphones. Tomorrow I’ll take the raggedy path up to the road, walk into town, buy a stamp and mail this. Town is a mini-mart, church, oyster-bar-dance-hall, fishing access, roadside cabins. Weekenders, locals, we can blend in. They couldn’t so well. We were trying to stay with the one thing most people agree on. They said there was no such one thing without everything else, you couldn’t make it so simple

Have books, tapes here, and this typewriter voice telling you what I’m telling you in the language we used to share. Everyone still sends love

There are no illusions at this table, she said to me

Room up under the roof. Men and women, a resistance cell ? I thought. Reaching hungrily for trays of folded bread, rice with lentils, brown jugs of water and pale beer. Joking across the table along with alertness, a kind of close mutual attention. One or two picking on small stringed instruments taken down from a wall

I by many decades the oldest person there. However I was there

Meal finished, dishes rinsed under a tap, we climbed down a kind of stair-ladder to the floor below. There were camouflage-patterned outfits packed in cartons; each person shook out and put on a pair of pants and a shirt, still creased from the packing. They wore them like work clothes. Packed underneath were weapons

Thick silverblack hair, eyes seriously alive, hue from some ancient kiln. The rest of them are in profile; that face of hers I see full focus

One by one they went out through a dim doorway to meet whoever they’d been expecting. I write it down from memory. Couldn’t find the house later yet

—No illusions at this table. Spoken from her time back into mine. I’m the dreaming ghost, guest, waitress, watcher, wanting the words to be true.

Whatever the weapons may come to mean

2009

III

From Sickbed Shores

From shores of sickness:   skin of the globe stretches and

snakes

out and in   room sound of the universe bearing

undulant wavelengths to an exhausted ear

(sick body in a sick country:   can it get well?

what is it anyway to exist as

matter   to

matter?)

All, all is remote from here:   yachts carelessly veering

tanker’s beak plunging into the strut of the bridge

slicked encircling waters

wired wrists   jerked-back heads

gagged mouths   flooded lungs

All, all remote and near

Wavelengths—

whose?   mine, theirs, ours   even

yours who haven’t yet put in a word?

So remoteness glazes sickened skin   affliction of

distance   so

strangely, easily, clinging like webs spread overnight

by creatures vanished

before we caught them at work

So: to bear this state, this caul which could be hell’s

airborne anaesthetic, exemption from feeling   or

hell’s pure and required definition:

—surrender

to un-belonging, being-for-itself-alone, runged

behind white curtains in an emergency cubicle, taking care

of its own

condition

All is matter, of course, matter-of-course   You could have

taken

courses in matter all along attending instead of cutting the class

You knew the telephone had wires, you could see them

overhead

where sparrows sat and chattered together

you alongside a window somewhere phone in hand

listening to tears thickening a throat in a city somewhere else

you muttering back your faulty formulae

ear tuned to mute vibrations from an occupied zone:

an old, enraged silence still listening for your voice

Did you then holding

the phone tongue your own lips finger your naked shoulder as

if you could liquefy touch into sound through wires   to lips

or shoulders lick

down an entire body in familiar mystery   irregardless laws

of matter?

Hopeless imagination of signals not to be

received

From the shores of sickness you lie out on listless

waters with no boundaries   floodplain without horizon

dun skies mirroring its opaque face and nothing not

a water moccasin or floating shoe or tree root to stir interest

Somewhere else being the name of whatever once said your

name

and you answered   now the only where is here   this dull

floodplain

this body sheathed in indifference   sweat no longer letting

the fever out

but coating it in oil   You could offer any soul-tricking

oarsman

whatever coin you’re still palming but there’s a divide

between the shores of sickness and the legendary, purifying

river of death   You will have this tale to tell, you will have

to live

to tell

this tale

2008

IV

Axel Avákar

Axel Avákar

Axel: backstory

Axel, in thunder

I was there, Axel

Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

[Axel Avákar: fictive poet, counter-muse, brother]

Axel Avákar

The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liar

My roots are not my chains

And I to you:   Whose hands have grown

through mine?   Owl-voiced I cried then:   Who?

But yours was the one, the only eye assumed

Did we turn each other into liars?

holding hands with each others’ chains?

At last we unhook, dissolve, secrete into islands

—neither a tender place—

yours surf-wrung, kelp-strung

mine locked in black ice on a mute lake

I dug my firepit, built a windbreak,

spread a sheepskin, zoned my telescope lens

to the far ledge of the Milky Way

lay down to sleep out the cold

Daybreak’s liquid dreambook:

lines of a long poem pouring down a page

Had I come so far, did I fend so well

only to read your name there, Axel Avákar?

Axel: backstory

Steam from a melting glacier

your profile hovering

there   Axel as if we’d lain prone at fifteen

on my attic bedroom floor   elbow to elbow reading

in Baltimorean August-

blotted air

Axel I’m back   to you

brother of strewn books of late

hours drinking poetry scooped in both hands

Dreamt you into existence, did I, boy-

comrade who would love

everything I loved

Without my eyelash glittering piercing

sidewise in your eye

where would you have begun, Axel   how

would the wheel-spoke have whirled

your mind?   What word

stirred in your mouth without my

nipples’ fierce erection?   our

twixt-and-between

Between us   yet

my part belonged to me

and when we parted

I left no part behind   I knew

how to make poetry happen

Back to you Axel through the crackling heavy

salvaged telephone

Axel, in thunder

Axel, the air’s beaten

like a drumhead here where it seldom thunders

dolphin

lightning

leaps

over the bay   surfers flee

crouching to trucks

climbers hanging

from pitons in their night hammocks

off the granite face

wait out an unforetold storm

while somewhere in all weathers you’re

crawling exposed   not by choice   extremist

hell-bent searching your soul

—O my terrified   my obdurate

my wanderer   keep the trail

I was there, Axel

Pain made her conservative.

Where the matches touched her flesh, she wears a scar.

—“The Blue Ghazals”

Pain taught her the language

root of radical

she walked on knives to gain a voice

fished the lake of lost

messages gulping up

from far below and long ago

needed both arms to haul them in

one arm was tied behind her

the other worked to get it free

it hurt itself because

work hurts   I was there Axel

with her in that boat

working alongside

and my decision was

to be in no other way

a woman

Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

1

And could it be I saw you

under a roof of glass

in trance

could it be   was passing

by and would translate

too late the strained flicker

of your pupils   your

inert gait   the dark

garb of your reflection

in that translucent place

could be I might have

saved you   still

could   or would   ?

2

Laid my ear to your letter trying to hear

Tongue on your words to taste you there

Couldn’t   read what you

had never written there

Played your message over

feeling bad

Played your message over it was all I had

To tell me what and wherefore

this is what it said:

I’m tired of you asking me why

I’m tired of words like the chatter of birds

Give me a pass, let me just get by

3

Back to back our shadows

stalk each other Axel but

not only yours and mine   Thickly lies

the impasto

scrape down far enough you get

the early brushwork   emblems

intimate detail

and scratched lines underneath

—a pictograph

one figure   leaning forward

to speak or listen

one figure backed away

unspeakable

(If that one moved—)

but the I you knew who made

you once can’t save you

my blood won’t even match yours

4

“The dead” we say   as if speaking

of “the people” who

gave up on making history

simply to get through

Something dense and null   groan

without echo   underground

and owl-voiced I cry Who

are these dead these people these

lovers who if ever did

listen no longer answer

: We :

5

Called in to the dead:   why didn’t you write?

What should I have asked you?

—what would have been the true

unlocking code

if all of them failed—

I’ve questioned the Book of Questions

studied gyres of steam

twisting from a hot cup

in a cold sunbeam

turned the cards over   lifted the spider’s foot

from the mangled hexagon

netted the beaked eel from the river’s mouth

asked   and let it go

2007–2008

V

Ballade of the Poverties

There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the

rusted toilet bowl

The poverty of to steal food for the first time

The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck

The poverty of sweet charity ladling

Soup for the poor who must always be there for that

There’s poverty of theory poverty of swollen belly shamed

Poverty of the diploma or ballot that goes nowhere

Princes of predation let me tell you

There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at

immigration

Poverty of the turned head averted eye

The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex

The poverty of the bounced check poverty of the dumpster

dive

The poverty of the pawned horn of the smashed reading

glasses

The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty

cleaning up the puke

The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed out on

pavement

Princes of finance you who have not lain there

There are poverties and there are poverties

There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door

And the poverty of stories patched up to sell there

There’s the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate

And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war

There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket

And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble

There’s the poverty of coming home not as you left it

And the poverty of how would you ever end it

Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war

There are poverties and there are poverties

There’s the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you

Can’t get to the poverty of bodies lying unburied

There’s the poverty of labor offered silently on the curb

The poverty of the no-contact prison visit

There’s the poverty of yard-sale scrapings spread

And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street

Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words

There are poverties and there are poverties

You who travel by private jet like a housefly

Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties

Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words

Here’s a mirror you can look into: take it: it’s yours.

for James and Arlene Scully

2009

Emergency Clinic

Caustic implacable

poem   unto and contra:

I do not soothe minor

injuries   I do

not offer   I require

close history

of the case   apprentice-

ship in past and fresh catastrophe

The skin too quickly scabbed

mutters for my debriding

For every bandaged wound

I’ll scrape another   open

I won’t smile

while wiping

your tears

I do not give

simplehearted   love and nor

allow you simply love me

if you accept   regardless

this will be different

Iodine-dark

poem walking to and fro all night

un-gainly

unreconciled

unto and contra

2008

Confrontations

It’s not new, this condition, just for awhile

kept deep

in the cortex of things imagined

Now the imagination comes of age

I see ourselves, full-lipped, blood-flushed

in cold air, still conflicted, still

embraced

boarding the uncharter’d bus of vanishment

backward glances over and done

afterimages

swirl and dissolve along a shoal of footprints

Simple ghouls flitter already among our leavings

fixing labels in their strange language

But

up to now we’re not debris

(only to their fascinated eyes)

2009

Circum/Stances

A crime of nostalgia

—is it—to say

the “objective conditions”

seemed a favoring wind

and we younger then

—objective fact—

also a kind of subjectivity

Sails unwrapped to the breeze

no chart

Slowly repetitiously to prise

up the leaden lid where the forensic

evidence was sealed

cross-section of a slave ship

diagram of a humiliated

mind high-resolution image

of a shredded lung

color slides of refugee camps

Elsewhere

(in some calm room far from pain)

bedsprings   a trunk empty

but for a scorched

length of electrical cord

how these got here from where

what would have beheld

Migrant assemblage:   in its aura

immense details writhe, uprise

To imagine what Become

present thén

within the monster

nerveless and giggling

(our familiar   our kin)

who did the scutwork

To differentiate

the common hell

the coils inside the brain

Scratchy cassette ribbon

history’s lamentation song:

Gone, friend I tore at

time after time

in anger

gone, love I could

time upon time

nor live nor leave

gone, city

of spies and squatters

tongues and genitals

All violence is not equal

(I write this

with a clawed hand

2008

Winterface

i. hers

Mute it utters ravage   guernican

mouth in bleak December

Busted-up lines of Poe:

—each separate dying ember

wreaks its ghost upon the floor

January moon-mouth

phosphorescence purged in dark to

swallow up the gone

Too soon

Dawn, twilight, wailing

newsprint, breakfast, trains

all must run their inter-

ruptured course

—So was the girl moving too fast   she was moving fast

across an icy web

Was ice a mirror   well the mirror was icy

And did she see herself in there

ii. his

Someone writes asking about your use

of Bayesian inference

in the history of slavery

What flares now from our burnt-up

furniture

You left your stricken briefcase here

no annotations

phantom frequencies stammer

trying to fathom

how it was inside alone where you were dying

2009

Quarto

1

Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over

The map of my battlefields.   Marathon.

Wounded Knee.   Vicksburg.   Jericho.

Battle of the Overpass.

Victories turned inside out

But no surrender

Cemeteries of remorse

The beaten champion sobbing

Ghosts move in to shield his tears

2

No one writes lyric on a battlefield

On a map stuck with arrows

But I think I can do it if I just lurk

In my tent pretending to

Refeather my arrows

I’ll be right there! I yell

When they come with their crossbows and white phosphorus

To recruit me

Crouching over my drafts

Lest they find me out

And shoot me

3

Press your cheek against my medals, listen through them to my heart

Doctor, can you see me if I’m naked?

Spent longer in this place than in the war

No one comes but rarely and I don’t know what for

Went to that desert as many did before

Farewell and believing and hope not to die

Hope not to die and what was the life

Did we think was awaiting after

Lay down your stethoscope back off on your skills

Doctor can you see me when I’m naked?

4

I’ll tell you about the mermaid

Sheds swimmable tail Gets legs for dancing

Sings like the sea with a choked throat

Knives straight up her spine

Lancing every step

There is a price

There is a price

For every gift

And all advice

2009

Don’t Flinch

Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver

when you lift your eyes.   It’s the glare.   Don’t flinch

The news you were reading

(who tramples whom) is antique

and on the death pages you’ve seen already

worms doing their normal work

on the life that was:   the chewers chewing

at a sensuality that wrestled doom

an anger steeped in love they can’t

even taste.   How could this still

shock or sicken you?   Friends go missing, mute

nameless.   Toss

the paper.   Reach again

for the Iliad.   The lines

pulse into sense.   Turn up the music

Now do you hear it?   can you smell smoke

under the near shingles?

2009

Black Locket

It lies in “the way of seeing the world”: in the technical sacredness of seeing that world.

—Pier Paolo Pasolini, of his film Accatone

The ornament hung from my neck is a black locket

with a chain barely felt for years clasp I couldn’t open

Inside: photographs of the condemned

Two

mystery planets

invaded from within

Pitcher of ice water thrown in a punched-in face

Eyes burnt back in their sockets

Negative archaeology

Driving the blind curve trapped in the blind alley

my blind spot blots the blinding

beauty of your face

I hear the colors of your voice

2009

Generosity

Death, goodlooking as only a skeleton can get

(good looks of keen intelligence)

sits poised at the typewriter, her locale, her pedestal

two books, one called Raging Beauty

another Lettera Amorosa, on this table

of drafts arguments letters

Her fine bony fingers go on calmly typing

the years at her turquoise-blue machine

(I say her but who knows death’s gender

as in life there are possible variations)

Anyway he or she sat on your desk in Tucson

in the apartment where you lived then and fed me

champagne, frybread, hominy soup and gave me

her or him   Later at the 7-Eleven we bought

a plastic sack of cotton to pack Death safe for travel

vagabond poet who can work anywhere

now here and of course still working

but startled by something or someone

turns her head   fingers lifted in midair

for Joy Harjo

2009

VI

You, Again

Some nights I think you want too much. From me. I didn’t ask

to parse again your idioms of littered

parking lots your chain-linked crane-hung sites

limp once more your crime-scene–festooned streets

to buildings I used to live in. Lose my nerve

at a wrong door on the wrong floor

in search of a time. The precision of dream is not

such a privilege. I know those hallways tiled in patterns

of oriental rugs those accordion-pleated

elevator gates. Know by heart the chipped

edges on some of those tiles. You who require this

heart-squandering want me wandering you, craving

to press a doorbell hear a lock turn, a bolt slide back

—always too much, over and over back

to the old apartment, wrong again, the key maybe

left with a super in charge of the dream who will not be found

2010

Powers of Recuperation

i

A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—

is writing history backward

her body the chair she sits in

to be abandoned repossessed

The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,

second world, third world,

cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,

infectious, maiming, class

war lives on

A done matter she might have thought

ever undone though plucked

from before her birthyear

and that hyphen coming after

She’s old, old, the incendiary

woman

endless beginner

whose warped wraps you shall find in graves

and behind glass plundered

ii

Streets empty now citizen rises shrugging off

her figured shirt pulls on her dark generic garment sheds

identity inklings watch, rings, ear studs

now to pocket her flashlight her tiny magnet

shut down heater finger a sleeping cat

lock inner, outer door insert

key in crevice listen once twice

to the breath of the neighborhood

take temperature of the signs a bird

scuffling a frost settling

… you left that meeting around two a.m. I thought

someone should walk with you

Didn’t think then I needed that

years ravel out and now

who’d be protecting whom

I left the key in the old place

in case

iii

Spooky those streets of minds

shuttered against shatter

articulate those walls

pronouncing rage and need

fuck the cops come jesus

blow me again

Citizen walking catwise

close to the walls

heat of her lungs leaving

its trace upon the air

fingers her tiny magnet

which for the purpose of drawing

particles together will have to do

when as they say the chips are down

iv

Citizen at riverbank seven bridges

Ministers-in-exile with their aides

limb to limb dreaming underneath

conspiring by definition

Bridges trajectories arched

in shelter rendezvous

two banks to every river two directions

to every bridge

twenty-eight chances

every built thing has its unmeant purpose

v

Every built thing with its unmeant

meaning   unmet purpose

every unbuilt thing

child squatting   civil

engineer   devising

by kerosene flare   in mud

possible tunnels

carves in cornmeal mush   irrigation

canals by index finger

all new learning looks at first

like chaos

the tiny magnet throbs

in citizen’s pocket

vi

Bends under the arc walks bent listening for chords and codes

bat-radar-pitched or twanging

off rubber bands and wires tin-can telephony

to scribble testimony by fingernail and echo

her documentary alphabet still evolving

Walks up on the bridge   windwhipped   roof and trajectory

shuddering under her catpaw tread

one of seven

built things holds her suspended

between desolation

and the massive figure on unrest’s verge

pondering the unbuilt city

cheek on hand and glowing eyes and

skirted knees apart

2007

Notes on the Poems

Waiting for Rain, for Music

Page 13: “Send my roots rain.” Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, 1986, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 183.

Page 13: “A struggle at the roots of the mind.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 212.

Reading the Iliad (As If ) for the First Time

Page 15: “For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors”; Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, (1940), trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill, 1956), p. 3.

Page 15: “Delusion / a daughter.” See Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 394–395, bk. 19, lines 91–130.

Pages 15–16: “Horses turn away their heads / weeping.” Homer, pp. 365–366, bk. 17, lines 426–440.

Fracture

Page 22: “it would be strange not to forgive.” “Essentially all this is crude and meaningless … as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive … and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive”; Anton Chekhov, Themes, Thoughts, Notes and Fragments, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.

Turbulence

Page 24: “O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer … Hold them cheap / May he who ne’er hung there”; Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, 1986, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 167.

I was there, Axel

Page 46: “The Blue Ghazals.” See Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 24.

Ballade of the Poverties

Pages 55–56: This revival of an old form owes inspiration to François Villon, The Poems of François Villon, ed. and trans. Galway Kinnell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

Black Locket

Page 70: “It lies in ‘the way of seeing the world’ …”; Laura Betti, ed., Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Future Life (Italy: Associazione “Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini,” 1989), pp. 19–20.

Generosity

Page 71: The books mentioned are James Scully, Raging Beauty: Selected Poems (Washington, D.C.: Azul Editions, 1994), and René Char, Lettera Amorosa (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), with illustrations by Georges Braque and Jean Arp.

Powers of Recuperation

Page 81: “the massive figure on unrest’s verge.” See Melencolia I, a 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer. The “I” is thought to refer to “Melencolia Imaginativa,” one of three types of melancholy described by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535).

Acknowledgments

Some of these poems appeared in the following print and online journals, several in earlier versions:

A Public Space: “Axel Avákar,” “Powers of Recuperation”

Boston Review: “Scenes of Negotiation”

Granta: “Don’t Flinch”

Michigan Quarterly Review: “Benjamin Revisited,” “Domain,” “Waiting for Rain, for Music”

Mita’am: A Review of Literature and Radical Thought (Israel): “Powers of Recuperation” (in Hebrew translation)

Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine: “Emergency Clinic,” “Ballade of the Poverties,” “You Again”

/One/: The Journal of Literature, Art and Ideas (http://onethejournal.com): “Fracture”

Red Wheelbarrow: “Circum/Stances”

Seneca Review: “From Sickbed Shores”

The Best American Poetry 2009: “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve”

The Best American Poetry 2010: “Domain”

The Nation: “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve,” “Quarto”

The Paris Review: “Fracture,” “Innocence”

Tin House: “Generosity,” “Turbulence,” “Winterface”

Once again, my thanks—

to Steven Barclay, Kathryn Barcos, Sara Bixler, and Eliza Fischer at the Steven Barclay Agency

to Jill Bialosky and her colleagues at W. W. Norton & Company, with special long-term appreciation to Carol Flechner and Claire Reinertsen;

to Frances Goldin, her partners Ellen Geiger and Sam Stoloff, and their colleagues at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency: Sarah Bridgins, Matt McGowan, Phyllis Jenkins.

In sometimes demanding personal and public times, and in their many ways, I am grateful for the active intelligence and loyalty of all the above.

Copyright © 2011 by Adrienne Rich

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rich, Adrienne.

Tonight no poetry will serve : poems,

2007–2010 / Adrienne Rich. — 1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-393-07967-8 (hardcover)

I. Title.

PS3535.I233T66 2011

811’.54—dc22

2010034593

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