DIVING

INTO

THE

WRECK

POEMS 1971–1972

ADRIENNE RICH

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CONTENTS

I

Trying to Talk with a Man

When We Dead Awaken

Waking in the Dark

Incipience

After Twenty Years

The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One

From the Prison House

The Stranger

Song

Dialogue

Diving into the Wreck

II

The Phenomenology of Anger

III

Merced

A Primary Ground

Translations

Living in the Cave

The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood At Last As a Sexual Message

Rape

Burning Oneself In

Burning Oneself Out

For a Sister

For the Dead

From a Survivor

August

IV

Meditations for a Savage Child

DIVING

INTO

THE

WRECK

I

Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.

—André Breton, Nadja

There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.

—George Eliot

TRYING TO TALK WITH A MAN

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

that’s why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river

forcing its way between deformed cliffs

an acute angle of understanding

moving itself like a locus of the sun

into this condemned scenery.

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

whole LP collections, films we starred in

playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows

full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,

the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,

afternoons on the riverbank

pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert

we meant to change the face of

driving among dull green succulents

walking at noon in the ghost town

surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of the place

except that it came with us

and is familiar

and everything we were saying until now

was an effort to blot it out—

Coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless

with you than without you

You mention the danger

and list the equipment

we talk of people caring for each other

in emergencies—laceration, thirst—

but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power

your eyes are stars of a different magnitude

they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT

when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger

as if it were not ourselves

as if we were testing anything else.

1971

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN

(FOR E.Y.)

1. Trying to tell you how

the anatomy of the park

through stained panes, the way

guerrillas are advancing

through minefields, the trash

burning endlessly in the dump

to return to heaven like a stain—

everything outside our skins is an image

of this affliction:

stones on my table, carried by hand

from scenes I trusted

souvenirs of what I once described

as happiness

everything outside my skin

speaks of the fault that sends me limping

even the scars of my decisions

even the sunblaze in the mica-vein

even you, fellow-creature, sister,

sitting across from me, dark with love,

working like me to pick apart

working with me to remake

this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness,

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

2. The fact of being separate

enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture

—a chest of seventeenth-century wood

from somewhere in the North.

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

but the key has not been found.

In the compartments are other keys

to lost doors, an eye of glass.

Slowly you begin to add

things of your own.

You come and go reflected in its panels.

You give up keeping track of anniversaries,

you begin to write in your diaries

more honestly than ever.

3. The lovely landscape of southern Ohio

betrayed by strip mining, the

thick gold band on the adulterer’s finger

the blurred programs of the offshore pirate station

are causes for hesitation.

Here in the matrix of need and anger, the

disproof of what we thought possible

failures of medication

doubts of another’s existence

—tell it over and over, the words

get thick with unmeaning—

yet never have we been closer to the truth

of the lies we were living, listen to me:

the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed

flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing

the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.

1971

WAKING IN THE DARK

1.

The thing that arrests me is

how we are composed of molecules

(he showed me the figure in the paving stones)

arranged without our knowledge and consent

like the wirephoto composed

of millions of dots

in which the man from Bangladesh

walks starving

on the front page

knowing nothing about it

which is his presence for the world

2.

We were standing in line outside of something

two by two, or alone in pairs, or simply alone,

looking into windows full of scissors,

windows full of shoes. The street was closing,

the city was closing, would we be the lucky ones

to make it? They were showing

in a glass case, the Man Without A Country.

We held up our passports in his face, we wept for him.

They are dumping animal blood into the sea

to bring up the sharks. Sometimes every

aperture of my body

leaks blood. I don’t know whether

to pretend that this is natural.

Is there a law about this, a law of nature?

You worship the blood

you call it hysterical bleeding

you want to drink it like milk

you dip your finger into into it and write

you faint at the smell of it

you dream of dumping me into the sea.

3.

The tragedy of sex

lies around us, a woodlot

the axes are sharpened for.

The old shelters and huts

stare through the clearing with a certain resolution

—the hermit’s cabin, the hunters’ shack—

scenes of masturbation

and dirty jokes.

A man’s world. But finished.

They themselves have sold it to the machines.

I walk the unconscious forest,

a woman dressed in old army fatigues

that have shrunk to fit her, I am lost

at moments, I feel dazed

by the sun pawing between the trees,

cold in the bog and lichen of the thicket.

Nothing will save this. I am alone,

kicking the last rotting logs

with their strange smell of life, not death,

wondering what on earth it all might have become.

4.

Clarity,

spray

blinding and purging

spears of sun striking the water

the bodies riding the air

like gliders

the bodies in slow motion

falling

into the pool

at the Berlin Olympics

control; loss of control

the bodies rising

arching back to the tower

time reeling backward

clarity of open air

before the dark chambers

with the shower-heads

the bodies falling again

freely

faster than light

the water opening

like air

like realization

A woman made this film

against

the law

of gravity

5.

All night dreaming of a body

space weighs on differently from mine

We are making love in the street

the traffic flows off from us

pouring back like a sheet

the asphalt stirs with tenderness

there is no dismay

we move together like underwater plants

Over and over, starting to wake

I dive back to discover you

still whispering, touch me, we go on

streaming through the slow

citylight forest ocean

stirring our body hair

But this is the saying of a dream

on waking

I wish there were somewhere

actual we could stand

handing the power-glasses back and forth

looking at the earth, the wildwood

where the split began

1971

INCIPIENCE

1. To live, to lie awake

under scarred plaster

while ice is forming over the earth

at an hour when nothing can be done

to further any decision

to know the composing of the thread

inside the spider’s body

first atoms of the web

visible tomorrow

to feel the fiery future

of every matchstick in the kitchen

Nothing can be done

but by inches. I write out my life

hour by hour, word by word

gazing into the anger of old women on the bus

numbering the striations

of air inside the ice cube

imagining the existence

of something uncreated

this poem

our lives

2. A man is asleep in the next room

We are his dreams

We have the heads and breasts of women

the bodies of birds of prey

Sometimes we turn into silver serpents

While we sit up smoking and talking of how to live

he turns on the bed and murmurs

A man is asleep in the next room

A neurosurgeon enters his dream

and begins to dissect his brain

She does not look like a nurse

she is absorbed in her work

she has a stern, delicate face like Marie Curie

She is not/might be either of us

A man is asleep in the next room

He has spent a whole day

standing, throwing stones into the black pool

which keeps its blackness

Outside the frame of his dream we are stumbling up the hill

hand in hand, stumbling and guiding each other

over the scarred volcanic rock

1971

AFTER TWENTY YEARS

(FOR A.P.C.)

Two women sit at a table by a window. Light breaks

unevenly on both of them.

Their talk is a striking of sparks

which passers-by in the street observe

as a glitter in the glass of that window.

Two women in the prime of life.

Their babies are old enough to have babies.

Loneliness has been part of their story for twenty years,

the dark edge of the clever tongue,

the obscure underside of the imagination.

It is snow and thunder in the street.

While they speak the lightning flashes purple.

It is strange to be so many women,

eating and drinking at the same table,

those who bathed their children in the same basin

who kept their secrets from each other

walked the floors of their lives in separate rooms

and flow into history now as the woman of their time

living in the prime of life

as in a city where nothing is forbidden

and nothing permanent.

1971

THE MIRROR IN WHICH TWO ARE SEEN AS ONE

1.

She is the one you call sister.

Her simplest act has glamor,

as when she scales a fish the knife

flashes in her long fingers

no motion wasted or when

rapidly talking of love

she steel-wool burnishes

the battered kettle

Love-apples cramp you sideways

with sudden emptiness

the cereals glutting you, the grains

ripe clusters picked by hand

Love: the refrigerator

with open door

the ripe steaks bleeding

their hearts out in plastic film

the whipped butter, the apricots

the sour leftovers

A crate is waiting in the orchard

for you to fill it

your hands are raw with scraping

the sharp bark, the thorns

of this succulent tree

Pick, pick, pick

this harvest is a failure

the juice runs down your cheekbones

like sweat or tears

2.

She is the one you call sister

you blaze like lightning about the room

flicker around her like fire

dazzle yourself in her wide eyes

listing her unfelt needs

thrusting the tenets of your life

into her hands

She moves through a world of India print

her body dappled

with softness, the paisley swells at her hip

walking the street in her cotton shift

buying fresh figs because you love them

photographing the ghetto because you took her there

Why are you crying dry up your tears

we are sisters

words fail you in the stare of her hunger

you hand her another book

scored by your pencil

you hand her a record

of two flutes in India reciting

3.

Late summer night the insects

fry in the yellowed lightglobe

your skin burns gold in its light

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

with its discipline, the nursery

with its nurse, the hospital

where all the powerful ones are masked

the graveyard where you sit on the graves

of women who died in childbirth

and women who died at birth

Dreams of your sister’s birth

your mother dying in childbirth over and over

not knowing how to stop

bearing you over and over

your mother dead and you unborn

your two hands grasping your head

drawing it down against the blade of life

your nerves the nerves of a midwife

learning her trade

1971

FROM THE PRISON HOUSE

Underneath my lids another eye has opened

it looks nakedly

at the light

that soaks in from the world of pain

even when I sleep

Steadily it regards

everything I am going through

and more

it sees the clubs and rifle-butts

rising and falling

it sees

detail not on TV

the fingers of the policewoman

searching the cunt of the young prostitute

it sees

the roaches dropping into the pan

where they cook the pork

in the House of D

it sees

the violence

embedded in silence

This eye

is not for weeping

its vision

must be unblurred

though tears are on my face

its intent is clarity

it must forget

nothing

SEPTEMBER 1971

THE STRANGER

Looking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heart

of the street to the river

walking the rivers of the avenues

feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt

watching the lights turn on in the towers

walking as I’ve walked before

like a man, like a woman, in the city

my visionary anger cleansing my sight

and the detailed perceptions of mercy

flowering from that anger

if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light

and hear them talking a dead language

if they ask me my identity

what can I say but

I am the androgyne

I am the living mind you fail to describe

in your dead language

the lost noun, the verb surviving

only in the infinitive

the letters of my name are written under the lids

of the newborn child

1972

SONG

You’re wondering if I’m lonely:

OK then, yes, I’m lonely

as a plane rides lonely and level

on its radio beam, aiming

across the Rockies

for the blue-strung aisles

of an airfield on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?

Well, of course, lonely

as a woman driving across country

day after day, leaving behind

mile after mile

little towns she might have stopped

and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely

it must be the loneliness

of waking first, of breathing

dawn’s first cold breath on the city

of being the one awake

in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely

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

in the last red light of the year

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

ice nor mud nor winter light

but wood, with a gift for burning

1971

DIALOGUE

She sits with one hand poised against her head, the

other turning an old ring to the light

for hours our talk has beaten

like rain against the screens

a sense of August and heat-lightning

I get up, go to make tea, come back

we look at each other

then she says (and this is what I live through

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

if sex is an illusion

I do not know

who I was when I did those things

or who I said I was

or whether I willed to feel

what I had read about

or who in fact was there with me

or whether I knew, even then

that there was doubt about these things

1972

DIVING INTO THE WRECK

First having read the book of myths,

and loaded the camera,

and checked the edge of the knife-blade,

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this

not like Cousteau with his

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone.

There is a ladder.

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for,

we who have used it.

Otherwise

it’s a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment.

I go down.

Rung after rung and still

the oxygen immerses me

the blue light

the clear atoms

of our human air.

I go down.

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean

will begin.

First the air is blue and then

it is bluer and then green and then

black I am blacking out and yet

my mask is powerful

it pumps my blood with power

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone

to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget

what I came for

among so many who have always

lived here

swaying their crenellated fans

between the reefs

and besides

you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail.

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth

the drowned face always staring

toward the sun

the evidence of damage

worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty

the ribs of the disaster

curving their assertion

among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.

And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair

streams black, the merman in his armored body

We circle silently

about the wreck

we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes

whose breasts still bear the stress

whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies

obscurely inside barrels

half-wedged and left to rot

we are the half-destroyed instruments

that once held to a course

the water-eaten log

the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are

by cowardice or courage

the one who find our way

back to this scene

carrying a knife, a camera

a book of myths

in which

our names do not appear.

1972

II

THE

PHENOMENOLOGY

OF ANGER

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ANGER

1. The freedom of the wholly mad

to smear & play with her madness

write with her fingers dipped in it

the length of a room

which is not, of course, the freedom

you have, walking on Broadway

to stop & turn back or go on

10 blocks; 20 blocks

but feels enviable maybe

to the compromised

curled in the placenta of the real

which was to feed & which is strangling her.

2. Trying to light a log that’s lain in the damp

as long as this house has stood:

even with dry sticks I can’t get started

even with thorns.

I twist last year into a knot of old headlines

—this rose won’t bloom.

How does a pile of rags the machinist wiped his hands on

feel in its cupboard, hour upon hour?

Each day during the heat-wave

they took the temperature of the haymow.

I huddled fugitive

in the warm sweet simmer of the hay

muttering: Come.

3. Flat heartland of winter.

The moonmen come back from the moon

the firemen come out of the fire.

Time without a taste: time without decisions.

Self-hatred, a monotone in the mind.

The shallowness of a life lived in exile

even in the hot countries.

Cleaver, staring into a window full of knives.

4. White light splits the room.

Table. Window. Lampshade. You.

My hands, sticky in a new way.

Menstrual blood

seeming to leak from your side.

Will the judges try to tell me

which was the blood of whom?

5. Madness. Suicide. Murder.

Is there no way out but these?

The enemy, always just out of sight

snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded

in a snowy blur, abominable snowman

—at once the most destructive

and the most elusive being

gunning down the babies at My Lai

vanishing in the face of confrontation.

The prince of air and darkness

computing body counts, masturbating

in the factory

of facts.

6. Fantasies of murder: not enough:

to kill is to cut off from pain

but the killer goes on hurting

Not enough. When I dream of meeting

the enemy, this is my dream:

white acetylene

ripples from my body

effortlessly released

perfectly trained

on the true enemy

raking his body down to the thread

of existence

burning away his lie

leaving him in a new

world; a changed

man

7. I suddenly see the world

as no longer viable:

you are out there burning the crops

with some new sublimate

This morning you left the bed

we still share

and went out to spread impotence

upon the world

I hate you.

I hate the mask you wear, your eyes

assuming a depth

they do not possess, drawing me

into the grotto of your skull

the landscape of bone

I hate your words

they make me think of fake

revolutionary bills

crisp imitation parchment

they sell at battlefields.

Last night, in this room, weeping

I asked you: what are you feeling?

do you feel anything?

Now in the torsion of your body

as you defoliate the fields we lived from

I have your answer.

8. Dogeared earth. Wormeaten moon.

A pale cross-hatching of silver

lies like a wire screen on the black

water. All these phenomena

are temporary.

I would have loved to live in a world

of women and men gaily

in collusion with green leaves, stalks,

building mineral cities, transparent domes,

little huts of woven grass

each with its own pattern—

a conspiracy to coexist

with the Crab Nebula, the exploding

universe, the Mind—

9. “The only real love I have ever felt

was for children and other women.

Everything else was lust, pity,

self-hatred, pity, lust.”

This is a woman’s confession.

Now, look again at the face

of Botticelli’s Venus, Kali,

the Judith of Chartres

with her so-called smile.

10. how we are burning up our lives

testimony:

the subway

hurtling to Brooklyn

her head on her knees

asleep or drugged

la vía del tren subterráneo

es peligrosa

many sleep

the whole way

others sit

staring holes of fire into the air

others plan rebellion:

night after night

awake in prison, my mind

licked at the mattress like a flame

till the cellblock went up roaring

Thoreau setting fire to the woods

Every act of becoming conscious

(it says here in this book)

is an unnatural act

1972

III

I saw a beggar leaning on his crutch,

He said to me: Why do you ask for so much?

I saw a woman leaning in a door,

She said, Why not, why not, why not ask for more?

—Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire”

(as sung by Judy Collins)

MERCED

Fantasies of old age:

they have rounded us up

in a rest-camp for the outworn.

Somewhere in some dustbowl

a barbed-wire cantonment

of low-cost dustcolored prefab

buildings, smelling of shame

and hopeless incontinence

identical clothes of disposable

paper, identical rations

of chemically flavored food

Death in order, by gas,

hypodermics daily

to neutralize despair

So I imagine my world

in my seventieth year alive

and outside the barbed wire

a purposeless exchange

of consciousness for the absence

of pain. We will call this life.

Yet only last summer I

burned my feet in the sand

of that valley traced by the thread

of the cold quick river Merced

watered by plummets of white

When I swam, my body ached

from the righteous cold

when I lay back floating the jays

flittered from pine to pine

and the shade moved hour by hour

across El Capitan

Our wine cooled in the water

and I watched my sons, half-men

half-children, testing their part

in a world almost archaic

so precious by this time

that merely to step in pure water

or stare into clear air

is to feel a spasm of pain.

For weeks now a rage

has possessed my body, driving

now out upon men and women

now inward upon myself

Walking Amsterdam Avenue

I find myself in tears

without knowing which thought

forced water to my eyes

To speak to another human

becomes a risk

I think of Norman Morrison

the Buddhists of Saigon

the black teacher last week

who put himself to death

to waken guilt in hearts

too numb to get the message

in a world masculinity made

unfit for women or men

Taking off in a plane

I look down at the city

which meant life to me, not death

and think that somewhere there

a cold center, composed

of pieces of human beings

metabolized, restructured

by a process they do not feel

is spreading in our midst

and taking over our minds

a thing that feels neither guilt

nor rage: that is unable

to hate, therefore to love.

1972

A PRIMARY GROUND

“But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle of life, warmed and soothed, to have his sense restored to him, his barrenness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life . . .”

—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

And this is how you live: a woman, children

protect you from the abyss

you move near, turning on the news

eating Thanksgiving with its pumpkin teeth

drinking the last wine

from the cellar of your wedding

It all seems innocent enough, this sin

of wedlock: you, your wife, your children

leaning across the unfilled plates

passing the salt

down a cloth ironed by a woman

with aching legs

Now they go out to play

in the coarse, rough November air

that smells of soft-coal smoke, the river,

burnt sweet-potato pie.

Sensuality dessicates in words—

risks of the portage, risks of the glacier

never taken

Protection is the genius of your house

the pressure of the steam iron

flattens the linen cloth again

chestnuts puréed with care are dutifully eaten

in every room the furniture reflects you

larger than life, or dwindling

Emptiness

thrust like a batch of letters to the furthest

dark of a drawer

But there is something else:

your wife’s twin sister, speechless

is dying in the house

You and your wife take turns

carrying up the trays,

understanding her case, trying to make her understand.

1972

TRANSLATIONS

You show me the poems of some woman

my age, or younger

translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow

enough to let me know

she’s a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:

we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls

baked it like bread in our ovens

worn it like lead on our ankles

watched it through binoculars as if

it were a helicopter

bringing food to our famine

or the satellite

of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman

doing things: stirring rice

ironing a skirt

typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call

from a phonebooth

The phone rings unanswered

in a man’s bedroom

she hears him telling someone else

Never mind. She’ll get tired.

hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy

and will in her own time

light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief

is shared, unnecessary

and political

1972

LIVING IN THE CAVE

Reading the Parable of the Cave

while living in the cave,

black moss

deadening my footsteps

candles stuck on rock-ledges

weakening my eyes

These things around me, with their

daily requirements:

fill me, empty me

talk to me, warm me, let me

suck on you

Every one of them has a plan that depends on me

stalactites want to become

stalagmites

veins of ore

imagine their preciousness

candles see themselves disembodied

into gas

and taking flight

the bat hangs dreaming

of an airy world

None of them, not one

sees me

as I see them

1972

THE NINTH SYMPHONY OF BEETHOVEN UNDERSTOOD AT LAST AS A SEXUAL MESSAGE

A man in terror of impotence

or infertility, not knowing the difference

a man trying to tell something

howling from the climacteric

music of the entirely

isolated soul

yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego

music without the ghost

of another person in it, music

trying to tell something the man

does not want out, would keep if he could

gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy

where everything is silence and the

beating of a bloody fist upon

a splintered table

1972

RAPE

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:

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

had certain ideals.

You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,

on horseback, one hand touching his gun.

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

he has access to machinery that could kill you.

He and his stallion clop like warlords among the trash,

his ideals stand in the air, a frozen cloud

from between his unsmiling lips.

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

the maniac’s sperm still greasing your thighs,

your mind whirling like crazy. You have to confess

to him, you are guilty of the crime

of having been forced.

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

whom you used to know, grow narrow and glisten,

his hand types out the details

and he wants them all

but the hysteria in your voice pleases him best.

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

he has taken down your worst moment

on a machine and filed it in a file.

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

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

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

and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

and if, in the sickening light of the precinct,

your details sound like a portrait of your confessor,

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

1972

BURNING ONESELF IN

In a bookstore on the East Side

I read a veteran’s testimony:

the running down, for no reason

of an old woman in South Vietnam

by a U.S. Army truck

The heat-wave is over

Lifeless, sunny, the East Side

rests under its awnings

Another summer

The flames go on feeding

and a dull heat permeates the ground

of the mind, the burn has settled in

as if it had no more question

of its right to go on devouring

the rest of a lifetime,

the rest of history

Pieces of information, like this one

blow onto the heap

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

another summer, and another

of suffering quietly

in bookstores, in the parks

however we may scream we are

suffering quietly

1972

BURNING ONESELF OUT

(FOR E.K.)

We can look into the stove tonight

as into a mirror, yes,

the serrated log, the yellow-blue

gaseous core

the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes,

I know inside my eyelids

and underneath my skin

Time takes hold of us like a draft

upward, drawing at the heats

in the belly, in the brain

You told me of setting your hand

into the print of a long-dead Indian

and for a moment, I knew that hand,

that print, that rock,

that sun producing powerful dreams

A word can do this

or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire

of my mind, burning as if it could go on

burning itself, burning down

feeding on everything

till there is nothing in life

that has not fed that fire

1972

FOR A SISTER

(Natalya Gorbanevskaya, two years incarcerated in a Soviet penal mental asylum for her political activism; and others)

I trust none of them. Only my existence

thrown out in the world like a towchain

battered and twisted in many chance connections,

being pulled this way, pulling in that.

I have to steal the sense of dust on your floor,

milk souring in your pantry

after they came and took you.

I’m forced to guess at the look you threw backward.

A few paragraphs in the papers,

allowing for printers’ errors, willful omissions,

the trained violence of doctors.

I don’t trust them, but I’m learning how to use them.

Little by little out of the blurred conjectures

your face clears, a sunken marble

slowly cranked up from underwater.

I feel the ropes straining under their load of despair.

They searched you for contraband, they made their notations.

A look of intelligence could get you twenty years.

Better to trace nonexistent circles with your finger,

try to imitate the smile of the permanently dulled.

My images. This metaphor for what happens.

A geranium in flames on a green cloth

becomes yours. You, coming home after years

to light the stove, get out the typewriter and begin again.

Your story.

1972

FOR THE DEAD

I dreamed I called you on the telephone

to say: Be kinder to yourself

but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way

trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the leftover

energy, water rushing down a hill

long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from

but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down

the red coals more extreme, more curious

in their flashing and dying

than you wish they were

sitting there long after midnight

1972

FROM A SURVIVOR

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact

of men & women in those days

I don’t know who we thought we were

that our personalities

could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know

the race had failures of that order

and that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me

as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:

I know what it could do and could not do

it is no longer

the body of a god

or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years

and you are wastefully dead

who might have made the leap

we talked, too late, of making

which I live now

not as a leap

but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next

1972

AUGUST

Two horses in yellow light

eating windfall apples under a tree

as summer tears apart  milkweeds stagger

and grasses grow more ragged

They say there are ions in the sun

neutralizing magnetic fields on earth

Some way to explain

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

If I am flesh sunning on rock

if I am brain burning in fluorescent light

if I am dream like a wire with fire

throbbing along it

if I am death to man

I have to know it

His mind is too simple, I cannot go on

sharing his nightmares

My own are becoming clearer, they open

into prehistory

which looks like a village lit with blood

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

1972

IV

MEDITATIONS

FOR A

SAVAGE CHILD

MEDITATIONS FOR A SAVAGE CHILD

(The prose passages are from J-M Itard’s account of The Wild Boy of Aveyron, as translated by G. and M. Humphrey)

I

There was a profound indifference to the objects of our pleasures and of our fictitious needs; there was still . . . so intense a passion for the freedom of the fields . . . that he would certainly have escaped into the forest had not the most rigid precautions been taken . . .

In their own way, by their own lights

they tried to care for you

tried to teach you to care

for objects of their caring:

glossed oak planks, glass

whirled in a fire

to impossible thinness

to teach you names

for things

you did not need

muslin shirred against the sun

linen on a sack of feathers

locks, keys

boxes with coins inside

they tried to make you feel

the importance of

a piece of cowhide

sewn around a bundle

of leaves impressed with signs

to teach you language:

the thread their lives

were strung on

II

When considered from a more general and philosophic point of view, these scars bear witness . . . against the feebleness and insufficiency of man when left entirely to himself, and in favor of the resources of nature which . . . work openly to repair and conserve that which she tends secretly to impair and destroy.

I keep thinking about the lesson of the human ear

which stands for music, which stands for balance—

or the cat’s ear which I can study better

the whorls and ridges exposed

It seems a hint dropped about the inside of the skull

which I cannot see

lobe, zone, that part of the brain

which is pure survival

The most primitive part

I go back into at night

pushing the leathern curtain

with naked fingers

then

with naked body

There where every wound is registered

as scar tissue

A cave of scars!

ancient, archaic wallpaper

built up, layer on layer

from the earliest, dream-white

to yesterday’s, a red-black scrawl

a red mouth slowly closing

Go back so far there is another language

go back far enough the language

is no longer personal

these scars bear witness

but whether to repair

or to destruction

I no longer know

III

It is true that there is visible on the throat a very extended scar which might throw some doubt upon the soundness of the underlying parts if one were not reassured by the appearance of the scar . . .

When I try to speak

my throat is cut

and, it seems, by his hand

The sounds I make are prehuman, radical

the telephone is always

ripped-out

and he sleeps on

Yet always the tissue

grows over, white as silk

hardly a blemish

maybe a hieroglyph for scream

Child, no wonder you never wholly

trusted your keepers

IV

A hand with the will rather than the habit of crime had wished to make an attempt on the life of this child . . . left for dead in the woods, he will have owed the prompt recovery of his wound to the help of nature alone.

In the 18th century infanticide

reaches epidemic proportions:

old prints attest to it: starving mothers

smothering babies in sleep

abandoning newborns in sleet

on the poorhouse steps

gin-blurred, setting fire to the room

I keep thinking of the flights we used to take

on the grapevine across the gully

littered with beer-bottles where dragonflies flashed

we were 10, 11 years old

wild little girls with boyish bodies

flying over the moist

shadow-mottled earth

till they warned us to stay away from there

Later they pointed out

the Venetian blinds

of the abortionist’s house

we shivered

Men can do things to you

was all they said

V

And finally, my Lord, looking at this long experiment . . . whether it be considered as the methodical education of a savage or as no more than the physical and moral treatment of one of those creatures ill-favored by nature, rejected by society and abandoned by medicine, the care that has been taken and ought still to be taken of him, the changes that have taken place, and those that can be hoped for, the voice of humanity, the interest inspired by such a desertion and a destiny so strange—all these things recommend this extraordinary young man to the attention of scientists, to the solicitude of administrators, and to the protection of the government.

1. The doctor in “Uncle Vanya”:

They will call us fools,

blind, ignorant, they will

despise us

devourers of the forest

leaving teeth of metal in every tree

so the tree can neither grow

nor be cut for lumber

Does the primeval forest

weep

for its devourers

does nature mourn

our existence

is the child with arms

burnt to the flesh of its sides

weeping eyelessly for man

2. At the end of the distinguished doctor’s

lecture

a young woman raises her hand:

You have the power

in your hands, you control our lives—

why do you want our pity too?

Why are men afraid

why do you pity yourselves

why do the administrators

lack solicitude, the government

refuse protection,

why should the wild child

weep for the scientists

why

ADRIENNE RICH was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. The author of more than thirty books, she brought discussions of gender, sexuality, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. Her urgent mission throughout her life and career was to articulate—and, in so doing, to enact—an unswervingly progressive vision for language and for life: her goal was, in her own words, “the creation of a society without domination.” Her other volumes of poetry include A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), The Fact of a Doorframe (1984), An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Tonight No Poetry Will Serve (2011), and, most recently, the posthumous collection Later Poems: Selected and New (2012). She was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck, the Bollinger Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

ALSO BY ADRIENNE RICH

Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010

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

Poetry & Commitment: An Essay

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006

The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2001

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

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

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

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

Many of these poems first appeared in the following periodicals:

American Poetry Review, The American Review, Antaeus, Aphra, Equal Time, Field, Mulberry, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Ohio Review, Partisan Review, Place, Ramparts, Salmagundi, Saturday Review, The Second Wave, Unmuzzled Ox, Women’s Studies.

Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Reissued as a Norton paperback 2013.

All rights reserved

Lyrics from Bird on the Wire © 1969 Stranger Music Inc. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

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

Rich, Adrienne, 1929–2012.

[Poems. Selections]

Diving into the wreck : poems 1971/1972 / Adrienne Rich. — Norton paperback edition.

pages cm

“Reissued as a Norton paperback 2013.”

ISBN 978-0-393-34601-5 (paperback)

I. Title.

PS3535.I233D58 2013

811'.54—dc23

2012042869

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