AN ATLAS OF

THE DIFFICULT

WORLD

POEMS 1988–1991

ADRIENNE RICH

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

NEW YORK · LONDON

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CONTENTS

I

AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD

_________________________________

i. A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

ii. Here is a map of our country:

iii. Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders . . .

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

v. Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

vi. A potato explodes in the oven.    Poetry and famine:

vii. (The dream-site) Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled

viii. He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him. He depended on that:

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

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

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

xii. What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last

xiii. (Dedications) I know you are reading this poem

II

_________________________________

She

That Mouth

Marghanita

Olivia

Eastern War Time

1. Memory lifts her smoky mirror:    1943,

2. Girl between home and school    what is that girl

3. How telegrams used to come:    ring

4. What the grown-ups can’t speak of    would you push

5. A young girl knows she is young and meant to live

6. A girl wanders with a boy into the woods

7. A woman of sixty    driving

8. A woman wired in memories

9. Streets closed, emptied by force    Guns at corners

10. Memory says:    Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

Tattered Kaddish

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud

I. Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud

II. Showering after ’flu;    stripping the bed;

III. If you know who died in that bed, do you know

IV. That light of outrage is the light of history

V. She who died on that bed sees it her way:

For a Friend in Travail

1948:   Jews

Two Arts

1. I’ve redone you by daylight.

2. Raise it up there and it will

Darklight

I. Early day.    Grey the air.

II. When heat leaves the walls at last

Final Notations

Notes

—for John Benedict, in memory—

I

AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD

I

A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

—a woman’s voice, a man’s voice or

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

past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires

THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes

dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand

in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist,

Malathion in the throat, communion,

the hospital at the edge of the fields,

prematures slipping from unsafe wombs,

the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching

planes dusting rows of pickers.

Elsewhere declarations are made:     at the sink

rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from market

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

finer than my mother’s handkerchief

received from her mother, hemmed and initialled

by the nuns in Belgium.”

One says:    “I can lie for hours

reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard.

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

“Mosquitoes pour through the cracks

in this cabin’s walls, the road

in winter is often impassable,

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

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

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

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

from day to day.    Every day an emergency.

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

What does that make me?”

In the writing workshop a young man’s tears

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

hoping they have redemption stored

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

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

have not broken fast that day,

remembers the Black Panthers spooning cereal.

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

tore up her writing, threw the kerosene

lantern into her face waiting

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

want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer

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

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

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

was really the stronger and ought not to leave him

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

wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials

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

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

another season, light and music still pouring over

our fissured, cracked terrain.

Within two miles of the Pacific rounding

this long bay, sheening the light for miles

inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over

strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind

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

ever-changing words, always the same language

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

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

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

But it would not surprise you

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

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

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

is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks

small canyons running through pitched hillsides

liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading

to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle

on their blond hills.    I drive inland over roads

closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons

roads that crawl down into darkness and wind into light

where trucks have crashed and riders of horses tangled

to death with lowstruck boughs.    These are not the roads

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

for life and death, is the same.

II

Here is a map of our country:

here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt

This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin

we dare not taste its water

This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms

This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms

This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy

This is the cemetery of the poor

who died for democracy    This is a battlefield

from a nineteenth-century war    the shrine is famous

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

went bankrupt    here is where the jobs were    on the pier

processing frozen fishsticks    hourly wages and no shares

These are other battlefields    Centralia    Detroit

here are the forests primeval    the copper    the silver lodes

These are the suburbs of acquiescence    silence rising fumelike

from the streets

This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires

flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling

whose children are drifting blind alleys pent

between coiled rolls of razor wire

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

then yes let it be    these are small distinctions

where do we see it from is the question

III

Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, bought at the

Ben Franklin, Barton, twenty-three years ago, one

chipped

—now they hold half-burnt darkred candles, and in between

a spider is working, the third point of her filamental passage

a wicker basket-handle.    All afternoon I’ve sat

at this table in Vermont, reading, writing, cutting an apple in

slivers

and eating them, but mostly gazing down through the windows

at the long scribble of lake due south

where the wind and weather come from.    There are bottles set in

the windows

that children dug up in summer woods or bought for nickels and

dimes

in dark shops that are no more, gold-brown, foam-green or cobalt

glass, blue that gave way to the cobalt

bomb.    The woods

are still on the hill behind the difficult unknowable

incommensurable barn.    The wind’s been working itself up

in low gusts gnashing the leaves left chattering on branches

or drifting over still-green grass;    but it’s been a warm wind.

An autumn without a killing frost so far, still warm

feels like a time of self-deception, a memory of pushing

limits in youth, that intricate losing game of innocence long

overdue.

Frost is expected tonight, gardens are gleaned, potplants taken

in, there is talk of withering, of wintering-over.

North of Willoughby the back road to Barton

turns a right-hand corner on a high plateau

bitten by wind now and rimed grey-white

—farms of rust and stripping paint, the shortest growing season

south of Quebec, a place of sheer unpretentious hardship, dark

pines stretching away

toward Canada.    There was a one-room schoolhouse

by a brook where we used to picnic, summers, a little world

of clear bubbling water, cowturds, moss, wild mint, wild mush-

rooms under the pines.

One hot afternoon I sat there reading Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte

Brontë—the remote

upland village where snow lay long and late, the deep-rutted

roads, the dun and grey moorland

—trying to enfigure such a life, how genius

unfurled in the shortlit days, the meagre means of that house. I

never thought

of lives at that moment around me, what girl dreamed

and was extinguished in the remote back-country I had come to

love,

reader reading under a summer tree in the landscape

of the rural working poor.

Now the panes are black and from the south the wind still stag-

gers, creaking the house:

brown milkweeds toss in darkness below but I cannot see them

the room has lost the window and turned into itself: two corner

shelves of things

both useful and unused, things arrived here by chance or choice,

two teapots, one broken-spouted, red and blue

came to me with some books from my mother’s mother, my

grandmother Mary

who travelled little, loved the far and strange, bits of India, Asia

and this teapot of hers was Chinese or she thought it was

—the other given by a German Jew, a refugee who killed herself:

Midlands flowered ware, and this too cannot be used because

coated inside—why?—with flaking paint:

“You will always use it for flowers,” she instructed when she

gave it.

In a small frame, under glass, my father’s bookplate, engraved in

his ardent youth, the cleft tree-trunk and the win-

tering ants:

Without labor, no sweetness—motto I breathed in from him and

learned in grief and rebellion to take and use

—and later learned that not all labor ends in sweetness.

A little handwrought iron candlestick, given by another German

woman

who hidden survived the Russian soldiers beating the walls in

1945,

emigrated, married a poet.    I sat many times at their table.

They are now long apart.

Some odd glasses for wine or brandy, from an ignorant, passion-

ate time—we were in our twenties—

with the father of the children who dug for old medicine bottles

in the woods

—afternoons listening to records, reading Karl Shapiro’s Poems of

a Jew and Auden’s “In Sickness and in Health”

aloud, using the poems to talk to each other

—now it’s twenty years since last I heard that intake

of living breath, as if language were too much to bear,

that voice overcast like klezmer with echoes, uneven, edged,

torn, Brooklyn street crowding Harvard Yard

—I’d have known any syllable anywhere.

Stepped out onto the night-porch.    That wind has changed,

though still from the south

it’s blowing up hard now, no longer close to earth but driving

high

into the crowns of the maples, into my face

almost slamming the stormdoor into me.    But it’s warm, warm,

pneumonia wind, death of innocence wind, unwinding wind,

time-hurtling wind.    And it has a voice in the house.    I hear

conversations that can’t be happening, overhead in the bedrooms

and I’m not talking of ghosts.    The ghosts are here of course but

they speak plainly

—haven’t I offered food and wine, listened well for them all

these years,

not only those known in life but those before our time

of self-deception, our intricate losing game of innocence long

overdue?

The spider’s decision is made, her path cast, candle-wick to

wicker handle to candle,

in the air, under the lamp, she comes swimming toward me

(have I been sitting here so long?)    she will use everything,

nothing comes without labor, she is working so

hard and I know

nothing all winter can enter this house or this web, not all labor

ends in sweetness.

But how do I know what she needs?    Maybe simply

to spin herself a house within a house, on her own terms

in cold, in silence.

IV

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

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

petalled

with her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to

California

runs the edges of orchards, chain-link fences

milo fields and malls, schoolyards and reservations

truckstops and quarries, grazing ranges, graveyards

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

jerusalem artichoke

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

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

a plant so generous?    Spendthrift we say, as if

accounting nature’s waste.    Ours darkens

the states to their strict borders, flushes

down borderless streams, leaches from lakes to the curdled foam

down by the riverside.

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

builder severed, brain of the maker starved

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

now at risk in this segregate republic

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

those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments

those urgently needed for the work of perception

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

new streets

work of the speaker who also listens

meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate

woman, the desperate man

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

be done without them

and where are they now?

V

Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

where any calendar’s ripped-off: Appomattox

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

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

of spit on the veteran’s shoulder

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

earth of despoiled graves and grazing these embittered brooks

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

nostrils,

the mouth of Liberty

over the chained bay waters

San Quentin:

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

gates

end of visiting hours, women piling into cars

the bleak glare aching over all

Where are we moored?    What

are the bindings?    What be-

hooves us?

Driving the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge

no monument’s in sight but fog

prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz

poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog

no icon lifts a lamp here

history’s breath blotting the air

over Gold Mountain    a transfer

of patterns like the transfer of African appliqué

to rural Alabama    voices alive in legends, curses

tongue-lashings

poems on a weary wall

And when light swivels off Angel Island and Alcatraz

when the bays leap into life

views of the Palace of Fine Arts,

TransAmerica

when sunset bathes the three bridges

still

old ghosts crouch hoarsely whispering

under Gold Mountain

____________________

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

fog

places where life is cheap poor quick unmonumented

Rukeyser would have guessed it coming West for the opening

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

when you think of your country    driving south

to West Virginia Gauley Bridge silicon mines the flakes of it

heaped like snow, death-angel white

—poet journalist pioneer mother

uncovering her country:    there are roads to take

____________________

I don’t want to know how he tracked them

along the Appalachian Trail, hid close

by their tent, pitched as they thought in seclusion

killing one woman, the other

dragging herself into town    his defense they had teased his

loathing

of what they were    I don’t want to know

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

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

and the sweet salt darkred tissue I lay my face

upon, my tongue within.

A crosshair against the pupil of an eye

could blow my life from hers

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

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

VI

A potato explodes in the oven.    Poetry and famine:

the poets who never starved, whose names we know

the famished nameless taking ship with their hoard of poetry

Annie Sullivan half-blind in the workhouse enthralling her child-

mates

with lore her father had borne in his head from Limerick along

with the dream of work

and hatred of England smouldering like a turf-fire. But a poetry older

than hatred. Poetry

in the workhouse, laying of the rails, a potato splattering oven

walls

poetry of cursing and silence, bitter and deep, shallow and

drunken

poetry of priest-talk, of I.R.A.-talk, kitchen-talk, dream-talk,

tongues despised

in cities where in a mere fifty years language has rotted to jargon,

lingua franca of inclusion

from turns of speech ancient as the potato, muttered at the coals

by women and men

rack-rented, harshened, numbed by labor ending

in root-harvest rotted in field. 1847. No relief. No succour.

America. Meat three times a day, they said.    Slaves—You would

not be that.

VII      (THE DREAM-SITE)

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

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

ning on the tarred roof:

leaned back your head to the nightvault swarming with stars

the Pleiades broken loose, not seven but thousands

every known constellation flinging out fiery threads

and you could distinguish all

—cobwebs, tendrils, anatomies of stars

coherently hammocked, blueblack avenues between

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

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

It was New York, the dream-site

the lost city the city of dreadful light

where once as the sacks of garbage rose

like barricades around us we

stood listening to riffs from Pharaoh Sanders’ window

on the brownstone steps

went striding the avenues in our fiery hair

in our bodies young and ordinary riding the subways reading

or pressed against other bodies

feeling in them the maps of Brooklyn Queens Manhattan

The Bronx unscrolling in the long breakneck

express plunges

as darkly we felt our own blood

streaming    a living city overhead

coherently webbed and knotted    bristling

we and all the others

known and unknown

living its life

VIII

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

He depended on that:

the cuts would be made by someone else, the direction

come from somewhere else, arrows flashing on the freeway.

That he’d end somewhere gazing

straight into It was what he imagined and nothing beyond.

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

flung

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

understand

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

DISTURB

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

ending in warnings about shellfish in Vietnamese, Spanish and

English.

But the spray was any color he could have dreamed

—gold, ash, azure, smoke, moonstone—

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

rock and taught him

limits.    Throwing itself backward, singing and sucking, no

teacher, only its violent

self, the Pacific, dialectical waters rearing

their wild calm constructs, momentary, ancient.

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

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

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

out

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

the father

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

what of the lost necklace glittering twisted in foam?

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

rocks

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

bottled message

from the sunken slaveships?    what of the huge sun slowly de-

faulting into the clouds

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

moon, the basket

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

packed for a family feast, excavated now by scuttling

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

all picnics are eaten on the grave?

IX

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

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

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

lonely in the prairie classroom with all the students who love

you. You know some ghosts

come everywhere with you yet leave them unaddressed

for years.    You spend weeks in a house

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

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

loneliness.

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

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

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

gangs?

But there were other stories:

one man riding the Mohave Desert

another man walking the Grand Canyon.

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

Indio’s long avenues

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

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

of talk.

At Twentynine Palms I found the grave

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

hole in 1903, under the now fire-branded palms

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

X

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

Winter sun in the rosetrees.

An old Mexican with a white moustache prunes them back,

spraying

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

adobe walls

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

lonely here

in the curve of the road winding through vast brown fields

machine-engraved in furrows

of relentless precision.    In the small chapel

La Nuestra Señora de la Soledad dwells in her shallow arch

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

as cinders

from head to foot.    Alone, solitary, homesick

in her lonely retreat.    Outside black olives fall and smash

littering and staining the-beaten path.    The gravestones of the

padres

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

day of another war.

Across the freeway stands another structure

from the other side of the mirror    it destroys

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

become completely disoganized, madness streaming from every throat

frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls

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

To determine how men will behave once they enter prison

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

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

buildings spaced in winter sun

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

side that cave?)

If my instructor tells me that the world and its affairs

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

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

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

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

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

that I should become perplexed?

From eighteen to twenty-eight

of his years

a young man schools himself, argues,

debates, trains, lectures to himself,

teaches himself Swahili, Spanish, learns

five new words of English every day,

chainsmokes, reads, writes letters.

In this college of force he wrestles bitterness,

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

Seven of these years in solitary.    Soledad.

But the significant feature of the desperate man reveals itself

when he meets other desperate men, directly or vicariously;

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

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

someone to understand, someone to accept the regard,

the love, that desperation forces into hiding.

Those feelings that find no expression in desperate times

store themselves up in great abundance, ripen, strengthen,

and strain the walls of their repository to the utmost;

where the kindred spirit touches this wall it crumbles—

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

than the desperate man.

XI

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

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

moon

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

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

lents bowed

juices sucked awry in one orgy of freezing

slumped on their stems like old faces evicted from cheap hotels

—into the streets of the universe, now!

Earthquake and drought followed by freezing followed by war.

Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming

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

The history of this earth and the bones within it?

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

shame and of hope?

Loyalties, symbols, murmurs extinguished and echoing?

Grids of states stretching westward, underground waters?

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

fibre, one woman

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

her task?

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

passing

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

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

mon fate

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

breath against marble lips

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

moment

some who aggrandize, some who diminish themselves in the face

of half-grasped events

—power and powerlessness run amuck, a tape reeling backward

in jeering, screeching syllables—

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

the old paroxysms of time

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

justice

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

privilege

some who have learned to handle and contemplate the shapes of

powerlessness and power

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

to lift and sponge, day upon day

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

ing by their own laws in the bed of death.

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

soul of her country

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

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

of the Viet Nam Wall)

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

wake

from the burnt-out dream of innocence, the nightmare

of the white general and the Black general posed in their

camouflage,

to remember her true country, remember his suffering land:

remember

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

to meet again in mourning

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

of all men

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

Where are we moored?

What are the bindings?

What behooves us?

XII

What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last

from inside out, executing the blueprints of resistance and mercy

drawn up in childhood, in that little girl, round-faced with

clenched fists, already acquainted with mourning

in the creased snapshot you gave me?    What homage will be

paid to beauty

that insists on speaking truth, knows the two are not always the

same,

beauty that won’t deny, is itself an eye, will not rest under

contemplation?

Those low long clouds we were driving under a month ago in

New Mexico, clouds an arm’s reach away

were beautiful and we spoke of it but I didn’t speak then

of your beauty at the wheel beside me, dark head steady, eyes

drinking the spaces

of crimson, indigo, Indian distance, Indian presence,

your spirit’s gaze informing your body, impatient to mark what’s

possible, impatient to mark

what’s lost, deliberately destroyed, can never any way be

returned,

your back arched against all icons, simulations, dead letters

your woman’s hands turning the wheel or working with shears,

torque wrench, knives, with salt pork, onions, ink

and fire

your providing sensate hands, your hands of oak and silk, of

blackberry juice and drums

—I speak of them now.

(FOR M.)

XIII       (DEDICATIONS)

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

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

in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet

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

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven

across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem

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

where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed

and the open valise speaks of flight

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

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light

of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide

while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.

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

of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light

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

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

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

lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on

because even the alphabet is precious.

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

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

hand

because life is short and you too are thirsty.

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

guessing at some words while others keep you reading

and I want to know which words they are.

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

between bitterness and hope

turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else

left to read

there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

1990–1991

II

SHE

goes through what must be gone through:

that catalogue she is pitching out

mildew spores    velvet between the tiles

soft hairs, nests, webs

in corners, edges of basins, in the teeth

of her very comb.    All that rots or rusts

in a night, a century.

Balances memory, training, sits in her chair

hairbrush in hand, breathing the scent of her own hair

and thinks:    I have been the weir

where disintegration stopped.

Lifts her brush once like a thrown thing

lays it down at her side like a stockpiled weapon

crushes out the light.    Elsewhere

dust chokes the filters, dead leaves rasp in the grate.

Clogged, the fine nets bulge

and she is not there.

1988

THAT MOUTH

This is the girl’s mouth, the taste

daughters, not sons, obtain:

These are the lips, powerful rudders

pushing through groves of kelp,

the girl’s terrible, unsweetened taste

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

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

a father can try to choke you,

a mother drown you to save you:

all the transactions have long been enacted.

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

strange trade-offs have long been made.

This is the swallow, the splash

of krill and plankton, that mouth

described as a girl’s—

enough to give you a taste:

Are you a daughter, are you a son?

Strange trade-offs have long been made.

1988

MARGHANITA

at the oak table under the ceiling fan

Marghanita at the table counting up

a dead woman’s debts.

Kicks off a sandal, sips

soda from a can, wedges the last bills

under the candelabrum.    She is here

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

her enemy died.    Her love.    Her twin.

Marghanita dreamed the intravenous, the intensive

the stainless steel

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

you know, they used to say.

She’s the artist, she got away.

In her own place Marghanita glues bronze

feathers into wings, smashes green and clear

bottles into bloodletting particles

crushed into templates of sand

scores mirrors till they fall apart and sticks them up

in driftwood boughs, drinks golden

liquid with a worm’s name, forgets

her main enemy, her twin;

scores her wrist on a birthday

dreams the hospital dream.

When they were girl and boy together, boy and girl

she pinned his arm against his back

for a box containing false

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

she let go and listened to his tales

she breathed their breath, he hers,

they each had names only the other knew.

Marghanita in the apartment everyone has left:

not a nephew, not a niece,

nobody from the parish

—gone into hiding, emigrated, lost?

where are the others?

Marghanita comes back because she does,

adding up what’s left:

a rainsoaked checkbook, snapshots

razed from an album,

colors ground into powder, brushes, wands

for eyelids, lashes, brows,

beads of bath-oil, tubes of glycerin

—a dead woman’s luxuries.

Marghanita will

take care of it all.    Pay if nothing else

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

stir corners of loose paper,

light ebbs from the window-lace,

she needs to go out and eat.    And so

hating and loving come down

to a few columns of figures,

an aching stomach, a care taken:    something done.

1989

OLIVIA

“Among fundamentalist Christians, she was one of them;

in our anti-apartheid groups, she was the

most militant. . . . She was a chameleon.”—White

South African student activist interviewed on National Public Radio, 10/11/88

Yes, I saw you, see you, come

into the meetings, out of the rain

with your wan cheek and your thin waist—

did anyone see you eat?

Did anyone see you eat, did you wear

a woman’s body, were you air

to their purpose, liquid at their call

when you stood, spine against the wall?

And I know your stance, back to the wall,

overlooking the others, your bent head

your sense of timing, your outraged tongue

the notes you take when you get home.

I see the white joints of your wrist

moving across the yellow pad

the exhausted theatre of your sleep:

I know the power you thought you had—

to know them all, better than they

knew you, than they knew you knew,

to know better than those who paid

you—paid by them, to move

at some pure point of mastery

as if, in your slight outline, moon

you could dwell above them, light and shade,

travel forever to and fro

above both sides, all sides, none,

gliding the edges, knapsack crammed

—was that it? to lift above

loyalty, love and all that trash

higher than power and its fields of force?

—never so much as a woman friend?

You were a woman walked on a leash.

And they dropped you in the end.

1988

EASTERN WAR TIME

1

Memory lifts her smoky mirror:    1943,

single isinglass window    kerosene

stove in the streetcar barn    halfset moon

8:15 a.m. Eastern War Time dark

Number 29 clanging in and turning

looseleaf notebook    Latin for Americans

Breasted’s History of the Ancient World

on the girl’s lap

money for lunch and war-stamps in her pocket

darkblue wool wet acrid on her hands

three pools of light    weak ceiling bulbs

a schoolgirl’s hope-spilt terrified

sensations wired to smells

of kerosene wool and snow

and the sound of the dead language

praised as key    torchlight of the great dead

Grey spreading    behind still-flying snow

the lean and sway of the streetcar she must ride

to become one    of a hundred girls

rising white-cuffed and collared in a study hall

to sing For those in peril on the sea

under plaster casts of the classic frescoes

chariots horses draperies certitudes.

2

Girl between home and school    what is that girl

swinging her plaid linen bookbag    what’s an American girl

in wartime    her permed friz of hair

her glasses for school and movies

between school and home    ignorantly Jewish

trying to grasp the world

through books:    Jude the Obscure    The Ballad

of Reading Gaol    Eleanor Roosevelt’s My Story

NV15       CABLE-LIVERPOOL       122       1/63NFD

HEADQUARTERS PLAN DISCUSSED AND UNDER

CONSIDERATION

ALL JEWS IN COUNTRIES OCCUPIED OR CONTROLLED

GERMANY

NUMBER 3½ - TO 4 MILLION SHOULD AFTER

DEPORTATION

AND CONCENTRATION IN EAST

AT ONE BLOW EXTERMINATED TO RESOLVE

ONCE AND FOR ALL JEWISH QUESTION IN EUROPE

3

How telegrams used to come:    ring

of the doorbell    serious messenger

bicycling with his sheaf    enveloped pasted strips

yellow on yellow    the stripped messages

DELAYED STOP MEET 2:27 THURSDAY

DAUGHTER BORN LAST NIGHT STOP BOTH DOING

WELL

THE WAR DEPARTMENT REGRETS TO INFORM YOU

also:    PARENTS DEPORTED UNKNOWN DESTINATION

EAST

SITUATION DIFFICULT    ether of messages

in capital letters           silence

4

What the grown-ups can’t speak of    would you push

onto children?    and the deadweight of Leo Frank

thirty years lynched    hangs heavy

:    “this is what our parents were trying to spare us”    :

here in America    but in terrible Europe

anything was possible    surely?

:    “But this is the twentieth century”    :

what the grown-ups can’t teach    children must learn

how do you teach a child what you won’t believe?

how do you say    unfold, my flower, shine, my star

and we are hated, being what we are?

5

A young girl knows she is young and meant to live

taken on the closed journey

her pockets drained of meaning

her ankles greased in vomit and diarrhea

driven naked across the yard

a young girl remembers her youth:

anything    textbooks    forbidden novels

school songs    petnames

the single time she bled and never since

having her hair done    its pale friz

clipped and shaped    still friz    pale Jewish hair

over her green Jewish eyes

thinking she was pretty and that others would see it

and not to bleed again and not to die

in the gas    but on the operating table

of the famous doctor

who plays string quartets with his staff in the laboratory

6

A girl wanders with a boy into the woods

a romantic walk    a couple in a poem

hand-in-hand    but you’re not watching each other

for signs of desire    you’re watching the woods

for signs of the secret bases    lines

converging toward the resistance    where the guns

are cached    the precious tools

the strategies argued    you’re fourteen, fifteen

classmates from Vilna    walking away from Vilna

your best marks were in history and geometry    his

in chemistry    you don’t intend to die

too much you think is waiting in you    for you

you never knew the forest outside Vilna

could hide so many    would have to

you’d dreamed of living in the forest

as in a folksong    lying on loose pine-needles

light ribboning from sky cross-hatched with needles

you and one dearest friend    now you will meet the others

7

A woman of sixty    driving

the great grades    sea-level to high desert

a century slipping from her shoulders

a blink in geological time

though heavy to those who had to wear it

Knowledge has entered her connective tissue and

into sand dissolved her cartilage

If her skeleton is found this will be clear

or was it knowledge    maybe a dangerous questioning

At night she lies    eyes open    seeing

the young who do not wander in the moonlight

as in a poem    faces seen

for thirty years    under the fire-hoses

walking through mobs to school

dragged singing from the buses

following the coffins

and here    brows knotted under knotted scarfs

dark eyes    searching armed streets

for the end of degradation

8

A woman wired in memories

stands by a house    collapsed in dust

her son beaten in prison    grandson

shot in the stomach    daughter

organizing the camps    an aunt’s unpublished poems

grandparents’ photographs    a bridal veil

phased into smoke    up the obliterate air

With whom shall she let down and tell her story

Who shall hear her to the end

standing if need be for hours    in wind

that swirls the levelled dust

in sun that beats through their scarfed hair

at the lost gate by the shattered prickly pear

Who must hear her to the end

but the woman    forbidden to forget

the blunt groats freezing in the wooden ladle

old winds    dusting the ovens with light snow?

9

Streets closed, emptied by force     Guns at corners

with open mouths and eyes    Memory speaks:

You cannot live on me alone

you cannot live without me

I’m nothing if I’m just a roll of film

stills from a vanished world

fixed lightstreaked mute

left for another generation’s

restoration and framing    I can’t be restored or framed

I can’t be still    I’m here

in your mirror    pressed leg to leg beside you

intrusive inappropriate bitter flashing

with what makes me unkillable though killed

10

Memory says:    Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

I’m a canal in Europe where bodies are floating

I’m a mass grave    I’m the life that returns

I’m a table set with room for the Stranger

I’m a field with corners left for the landless

I’m accused of child-death    of drinking blood

I’m a man-child praising God he’s a man

I’m a woman bargaining for a chicken

I’m a woman who sells for a boat ticket

I’m a family dispersed between night and fog

I’m an immigrant tailor who says A coat

is not a piece of cloth only    I sway

in the learnings of the master-mystics

I have dreamed of Zion    I’ve dreamed of world revolution

I have dreamed my children could live at last like others

I have walked the children of others through ranks of hatred

I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin

a river in Mississippi    I’m a woman standing

with other women dressed in black

on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem

there is spit on my sleeve there are phonecalls in the night

I am a woman standing in line for gasmasks

I stand on a road in Ramallah    with naked face    listening

I am standing here in your poem    unsatisfied

lifting my smoky mirror

1989–1990

TATTERED KADDISH

Taurean reaper of the wild apple field

messenger from earthmire gleaning

transcripts of fog

in the nineteenth year and the eleventh month

speak your tattered Kaddish for all suicides:

Praise to life though it crumbled in like a tunnel

on ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though its windows blew shut

on the breathing-room of ones we knew and loved

Praise to life though ones we knew and loved

loved it badly, too well, and not enough

Praise to life though it tightened like a knot

on the hearts of ones we thought we knew loved us

Praise to life giving room and reason

to ones we knew and loved who felt unpraisable

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

1989

THROUGH CORRALITOS UNDER

ROLLS OF CLOUD

I

Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud

between winter-stiff, ranged apple-trees

each netted in transparent air,

thin sinking light, heartsick within and filmed

in heartsickness around you, gelatin cocoon

invisible yet impervious—to the hawk

steering against the cloudbank, to the clear

oranges burning at the rancher’s gate

rosetree, agave, stiff beauties holding fast

with or without your passion,

the pruners freeing up the boughs

in the unsearched faith these strange stiff shapes will bear.

II

Showering after ’flu;    stripping the bed;

running the shrouds of sickness through the wash;

airing the rooms;    emptying the trash;

it’s as if part of you had died in the house

sometime in that last low-lit afternoon

when your dreams ebbed salt-thick into the sheets

and now this other’s left to wash the corpse,

burn eucalyptus, turn the mirrors over—

this other who herself barely came back,

whose breath was fog to your mist, whose stubborn shadow

covered you as you lay freezing, she survived

uncertain who she is or will be without you.

III

If you know who died in that bed, do you know

who has survived?    If you say, she was weaker,

held life less dear, expected others

to fight for her    if pride lets you name her

victim    and the one who got up and threw

the windows open, stripped the bed, survivor

—what have you said, what do you know

of the survivor when you know her

only in opposition to the lost?

What does it mean to say I have survived

until you take the mirrors and turn them outward

and read your own face in their outraged light?

IV

That light of outrage is the light of history

springing upon us when we’re least prepared,

thinking maybe a little glade of time

leaf-thick and with clear water

is ours, is promised us, for all we’ve hacked

and tracked our way through:    to this:

What will it be?    Your wish or mine?    your

prayers or my wish then:    that those we love

be well, whatever that means, to be well.

Outrage:    who dare claim protection for their own

amid such unprotection?    What kind of prayer

is that?    To what kind of god?    What kind of wish?

V

She who died on that bed sees it her way:

She who went under peers through the translucent shell

cupping her death and sees her other well,

through a long lens, in silvered outline, well

she sees her other and she cannot tell

why when the boom of surf struck at them both

she felt the undertow and heard the bell,

thought death would be their twinning, till the swell

smashed her against the reef, her other still

fighting the pull, struggling somewhere away

further and further, calling her all the while:

she who went under summons her other still.

1989–1990

FOR A FRIEND IN TRAVAIL

Waking from violence:    the surgeon’s probe left in the foot

paralyzing the body from the waist down.

Dark before dawn:    wrapped in a shawl, to walk the house

the Drinking-Gourd slung in the northwest,

half-slice of moon to the south

through dark panes.    A time to speak to you.

What are you going through? she said, is the great question.

Philosopher of oppression, theorist

of the victories of force.

We write from the marrow of our bones.    What she did not

ask, or tell:    how victims save their own lives.

That crawl along the ledge, then the ravelling span of fibre

strung

from one side to the other, I’ve dreamed that too.

Waking, not sure we made it.    Relief, appallment, of waking.

Consciousness.    O, no.    To sleep again.

O to sleep without dreaming.

How day breaks, when it breaks, how clear and light the moon

melting into moon-colored air

moist and sweet, here on the western edge.

Love for the world, and we are part of it.

How the poppies break from their sealed envelopes

she did not tell.

What are you going through, there on the other edge?

1990

1948:   JEWS

A mother’s letter, torn open

in a college mailroom:

. . . Some of them will be

the most brilliant, fascinating

you’ll ever meet

but don’t get taken up by any clique

trying to claim you

—Marry out, like your father

she didn’t write    She wrote for    wrote

against    him

It was a burden for anyone

to be fascinating, brilliant

after the six million

Never mind just coming home

and trying to get some sleep

like an ordinary person

1990

TWO ARTS

1

I’ve redone you by daylight.

Squatted before your gauntness

chipping away.    Slivers of rock

piling up like petals.

All night I’d worked to illuminate the skull.

By dawn you were pure electric.    You pulsed like a star.

You awoke in the last darkness

before the light poured in.

I’ve redone you by daylight.

Now I can submit you to the arts administrator

and the council of patrons

who could never take your measure.

This time they will love you,

standing on the glass table, fluent and robed at last,

and all your origins countered.

I wrap you in pure white sheets to mail you,

I brush you off my apron,

the charged filings crunch like cinders on the floor.

2

Raise it up there and it will

loom, the gaunt original thing

gristle and membrane of your life

mortared with shells of trilobites

it will hold between the cracks

of lightning, in the deadpan face of before and after

it will stick on up there as you left it

pieced together by starlight

it will hang by the flying buttresses you gave it

—hulk of mist, rafter of air, suspension bridge of mica

helm of sweat and dew—

but you have to raise it up there, you

have a brutal thing to do.

1990

DARKLIGHT

I

Early day.    Grey the air.

Grey the boards of the house, the bench,

red the dilated potflower’s petals

blue the sky that will rend through

this fog.

Dark summer’s outer reaches:

thrown husk of a moon

sharpening

in the last dark blue.

I think of your eye

(dark the light

that washes into a deeper dark).

An eye, coming in closer.

Under the lens

lashes and veins grow huge

and huge the tear that washes out the eye,

the tear that clears the eye.

II

When heat leaves the walls at last

and the breeze comes

or seems to come, off water

or off the half-finished moon

her silver roughened by a darkblue rag

this is the ancient hour

between light and dark, work and rest

earthly tracks and star-trails

the last willed act of the day

and the night’s first dream

If you could have this hour

for the last hour of your life.

1988–1990

FINAL NOTATIONS

it will not be simple, it will not be long

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

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

it will be short, it will not be simple

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

it will not be long, it will occupy your thought

as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied

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

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you

you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you

you are taking parts of us into places never planned

you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath

it will not be simple, it will become your will

1991

NOTES

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

“An Atlas of the Difficult World, VI”: “hatred of England smouldering like a turf-fire.” See Nella Braddy, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story behind Helen Keller (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933), p. 13. “Meat three times a day.” See Frank Murray, “The Irish and Afro-Americans in U.S. History,” Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement 22, no. 1 (1982): 22.

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

“Eastern War Time, 2”: Text of a telegram sent through the American legation in Bern, Switzerland, August 11, 1942, to the U.S. State Department in Washington, and transmitted after several weeks’ delay to Rabbi Stephen Wise in New York. See David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 42–45.

“Eastern War Time, 4”: Charged with the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl employed in his uncle’s pencil factory in Atlanta, Leo Max Frank (1884–1915), a mechanical engineer, was tried and found guilty, and the decision appealed, in a climate of intense anti-Semitism. When his sentence was commuted from death to life by the governor of Georgia, he was dragged by a mob from prison and lynched.

“Eastern War Time, 10”: “A coat is not a piece of cloth only.” See Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 44. Myerhoff quotes Shmuel Goldman, immigrant Socialist garment-worker: “It is not the way of a Jew to make his work like there was no human being to suffer when it’s done badly. A coat is not a piece of cloth only. The tailor is connected to the one who wears it and he should not forget it.”

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

“For a Friend in Travail”: “The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ ” Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Putnam, 1951), p. 115.

“In An Atlas of the Difficult World Rich says: ‘We write from the marrow of our bones.’ So she has written since the 1960s, saying what we longed to say, but could not, or dared not. She is a crucial poet: each volume more courageous, newly elegant. In this book she makes me, even in these harsh times, brave, toughened by her boldness, her skill.”

—Carolyn G. Heilbrun

“Adrienne Rich’s poems, volume after volume, have been the makings of one of the authentic, unpredictable, urgent, essential voices of our time. All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth, and her command of language from the first has been startlingly powerful. This new book of hers—and a new book it is, another departure, another search—is one that I read with happy confirmation, recognizing again and again fulfillments of the immense gifts of talent and character she began with, rejoicing to see that she has made them do things until now untried, unrisked, unimagined, in the pursuit of her untamed aspiration. I am grateful that these poems speak to me not only of the world we live in but of herself.”

—W. S. Merwin

“An Atlas of the Difficult World is alive with beautiful and moving singing, with wisdom and authority. Adrienne Rich is our Atlas, holding up not the heavens but the earth—and not just bearing it, as a burden-bearer, but dancing with it, as a lover.”

—Sharon Olds

BY ADRIENNE RICH

Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

Collected Early Poems 1950–1970

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991

Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1986

Your Native Land, Your Life

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

Sources

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far

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

The Dream of a Common Language

Twenty-one Love Poems

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974

Diving into the Wreck

The Will to Change

Leaflets

Necessities of Life

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

The Diamond Cutters

A Change of World

“This is no place you ever knew me,” writes Adrienne Rich in her major new work, “. . . These are not the roads/you knew me by.” As always in her forty-year career, this major poet has mapped out new territory, astonishing and enlightening us with her penetrating insight into our lives amid the beauties and cruelties of our difficult world.

The most recent of the many honors paid Adrienne Rich during her distinguished career is the 1991 Common Wealth Award in Literature. This is her thirteenth book of poetry. She lives in California.

Graceful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following: George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).

These poems were originally published in the following journals and magazines:

American Poetry Review—“An Atlas of the Difficult World,” I, II, IV, V, VI.

Bastard Review—“That Mouth” and “Olivia.”

Beloit Poetry Journal (Fortieth Anniversary Issue)—“Marghanita.”

Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends—“An Atlas of the Difficult World,” XI, XIII; “Eastern War Time.”

Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics—“Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud.”

Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies—“An Atlas of the Difficult World,” X, XII; “1948: Jews.”

Ms.—“She.”

Poetry—“Final Notations,” “For a Friend in Travail,” “Two Arts.”

Copyright © 1991 by Adrienne Rich

All rights reserved.

Book design by Antonina Krass

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

Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

An atlas of the difficult world: poems, 1988–1991 / Adrienne

Rich.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3535.I233A84    1991

811′.54—dc20         91-12900

ISBN: 978-0-393-30831-0

ISBN: 978-0-393-34574-2 (e-book)

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

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

www.wwnorton.com

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Contents

I An Atlas of the Difficult World

i. A dark woman, head bent, listening for something

ii. Here is a map of our country:

iii. Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders . . .

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

v. Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin

vi. A potato explodes in the oven. Poetry and famine:

vii. (The dream-site) Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled

viii. He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him. He depended on that:

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

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

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

xii. What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last

xiii. (Dedications) I know you are reading this poem

II

She

That Mouth

Marghanita

Olivia

Eastern War Time

1. Memory lifts her smoky mirror: 1943,

2. Girl between home and school what is that girl

3. How telegrams used to come: ring

4. What the grown-ups can’t speak of would you push

5. A young girl knows she is young and meant to live

6. A girl wanders with a boy into the woods

7. A woman of sixty driving

8. A woman wired in memories

9. Streets closed, emptied by force Guns at corners

10. Memory says: Want to do right? Don’t count on me.

Tattered Kaddish

Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud

I. Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud

II. Showering after ’flu; stripping the bed;

III. If you know who died in that bed, do you know

IV. That light of outrage is the light of history

V. She who died on that bed sees it her way:

For a Friend in Travail

1948: Jews

Two Arts

1. I’ve redone you by daylight.

2. Raise it up there and it will

Darklight

I. Early day. Grey the air.

II. When heat leaves the walls at last

Final Notations

Notes

Praise for AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD

Also by Adrienne Rich

About the Author

Copyright