SNAPSHOTS OF A

DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

POEMS

1954–1962

Adrienne Rich

W . W . NORTON & COMPANY . INC.

NEW YORK

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

CONTENTS

At Majority

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

Rural Reflections

The Knight

The Loser

The Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame

Euryclea’s Tale

September 21

After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge”

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Passing On

The Raven

Merely to Know

Antinoüs: The Diaries

Juvenilia

Double Monologue

A Woman Mourned by Daughters

Readings of History

To the Airport

The Afterwake

Artificial Intelligence

A Marriage in the ’Sixties

First Things

Attention

End of an Era

Rustication

Apology

Sisters

In the North

Peeling Onions

Ghost of a Chance

The Well

Novella

Face

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Likeness

Always the Same

Peace

The Roofwalker

Notes on the Poems

A JOHN SIMON GUGGENHEIM MEMORIAL FELLOWSHIP

AND AN AMY LOWELL TRAVELLING SCHOLARSHIP BOTH

CONTRIBUTED GREATLY TO THE YEARS DURING WHICH

MUCH OF THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN.

SNAPSHOTS OF A

DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

AT MAJORITY

—for C.—

When you are old and beautiful,

And things most difficult are done,

There will be few who can recall

Your face that I see ravaged now

By youth and its oppressive work.

Your look will hold their wondering looks

Grave as Cordelia’s at the last,

Neither with rancor at the past

Nor to upbraid the coming time.

For you will be at peace with time.

But now, a daily warfare takes

Its toll of tenderness in you,

And you must live like captains who

Wait out the hour before the charge—

Fearful, and yet impatient too.

Yet someday this will have an end,

All choices made or choice resigned,

And in your face the literal eye

Trace little of your history,

Nor ever piece the tale entire

Of villages that had to burn

And playgrounds of the will destroyed

Before you could be safe from time

And gather in your brow and air

The stillness of antiquity.

1954

FROM MORNING-GLORY TO PETERSBURG

(The World Book, 1928)

“Organized knowledge in story and picture”

confronts through dusty glass

an eye grown dubious.

I can recall when knowledge still was pure,

not contradictory, pleasurable

as cutting out a paper doll.

You opened up a book and there it was:

everything just as promised, from

Kurdistan to Mormons, Gum

Arabic to Kumquat, neither more nor less.

Facts could be kept separate

by a convention; that was what

made childhood possible. Now knowledge finds me out;

in all its risible untidiness

it traces me to each address,

dragging in things I never thought about.

I don’t invite what facts can be

held at arm’s length; a family

of jeering irresponsibles always

comes along gypsy-style

and there you have them all

forever on your hands. It never pays.

If I could still extrapolate

the morning-glory on the gate

from Petersburg in history—but it’s too late.

1954

RURAL REFLECTIONS

This is the grass your feet are planted on.

You paint it orange or you sing it green,

But you have never found

A way to make the grass mean what you mean.

A cloud can be whatever you intend:

Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye.

But you have never found

A cloud sufficient to express the sky.

Get out there with your splendid expertise;

Raymond who cuts the meadow does no less.

Inhuman nature says:

Inhuman patience is the true success.

Human impatience trips you as you run;

Stand still and you must lie.

It is the grass that cuts the mower down;

It is the cloud that swallows up the sky.

1956

THE KNIGHT

A knight rides into the noon,

and his helmet points to the sun,

and a thousand splintered suns

are the gaiety of his mail.

The soles of his feet glitter

and his palms flash in reply,

and under his crackling banner

he rides like a ship in sail.

A knight rides into the noon,

and only his eye is living,

a lump of bitter jelly

set in a metal mask,

betraying rags and tatters

that cling to the flesh beneath

and wear his nerves to ribbons

under the radiant casque.

Who will unhorse this rider

and free him from between

the walls of iron, the emblems

crushing his chest with their weight?

Will they defeat him gently,

or leave him hurled on the green,

his rags and wounds still hidden

under the great breastplate?

1957

THE LOSER

A man thinks of the woman he once loved:

first, after her wedding, and then nearly a

decade later.

I

I kissed you, bride and lost, and went

home from that bourgeois sacrament,

your cheek still tasting cold upon

my lips that gave you benison

with all the swagger that they knew—

as losers somehow learn to do.

Your wedding made my eyes ache; soon

the world would be worse off for one

more golden apple dropped to ground

without the least protesting sound,

and you would windfall lie, and we

forget your shimmer on the tree.

Beauty is always wasted: if

not Mignon’s song sung to the deaf,

at all events to the unmoved.

A face like yours cannot be loved

long or seriously enough.

Almost, we seem to hold it off.

II

Well, you are tougher than I thought.

Now when the wash with ice hangs taut

this morning of St. Valentine,

I see you strip the squeaking line,

your body weighed against the load,

and all my groans can do no good.

Because you still are beautiful,

though squared and stiffened by the pull

of what nine windy years have done.

You have three daughters, lost a son.

I see all your intelligence

flung into that unwearied stance.

My envy is of no avail.

I turn my head and wish him well

who chafed your beauty into use

and lives forever in a house

lit by the friction of your mind.

You stagger in against the wind.

1958

THE ABSENT-MINDED ARE ALWAYS TO BLAME

What do you look for down there

in the cracks of the pavement? Or up there

between the pineapple and the acanthus leaf

in that uninspired ornament? Odysseus

wading half-naked out of the shrubbery

like a god, dead serious among those at play,

could hardly be more out of it. In school

we striped your back with chalk, you all oblivious,

your eyes harnessed by a transparent strand

reaching the other side of things, or down

like a wellchain to the center of earth.

Now with those same eyes you pull the

pavements up like old linoleum,

arches of triumph start to liquefy

minutes after you slowly turn away.

1958

EURYCLEA’S TALE

I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting

for a father dawdling among the isles,

and the seascape hollowed out by that boy’s edged gaze

to receive one speck, one only, for years and years withheld.

And that speck, that curious man, has kept from home

till home would seem the forbidden place, till blood

and the tears of an old woman must run down

to satisfy the genius of place. Even then, what

can they do together, father and son?

the driftwood stranger and the rooted boy

whose eyes will have nothing then to ask the sea.

But all the time and everywhere

lies in ambush for the distracted eyeball

light: light on the ship racked up in port,

the chimney-stones, the scar whiter than smoke,

than her flanks, her hair, that true but aging bride.

1958

SEPTEMBER 21

Wear the weight of equinoctial evening,

light like melons bruised on all the porches.

Feel the houses tenderly appraise you,

hold you in the watchfulness of mothers.

Once the nighttime was a milky river

washing past the swimmers in the sunset,

rinsing over sleepers of the morning.

Soon the night will be an eyeless quarry

where the shrunken daylight and its rebels,

loosened,     dive like stones in perfect silence,

names and voices drown without reflection.

Then the houses draw you. Then they have you.

1958

AFTER A SENTENCE IN “MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE”

The month’s eye blurs.

The winter’s lungs are cracked.

Along bloated gutters race,

shredded, your injured legions,

the waste of our remorseless search.

Your old, unuttered names are holes

worn in our skins

through which we feel from time to time

abrasive wind.

Those who are loved live poorly and in danger.

We who were loved will never

unlive that crippling fever.

A day returns, a certain weather

splatters the panes, and we

once more stare in the eye of our first failure.

1958

SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

1.

You, once a belle in Shreveport,

with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,

still have your dresses copied from that time,

and play a Chopin prelude

called by Cortot: “Delicious recollections

float like perfume through the memory.”

Your mind now, mouldering like wedding-cake,

heavy with useless experience, rich

with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,

crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge

of mere fact. In the prime of your life.

Nervy, glowering, your daughter

wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

2.

Banging the coffee-pot into the sink

she hears the angels chiding, and looks out

past the raked gardens to the sloppy sky.

Only a week since They said: Have no patience.

The next time it was: Be insatiable.

Then: Save yourself; others you cannot save.

Sometimes she’s let the tapstream scald her arm,

a match burn to her thumbnail,

or held her hand above the kettle’s snout

right in the woolly steam. They are probably angels,

since nothing hurts her any more, except

each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes.

3.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,

that sprung-lidded, still commodious

steamer-trunk of tempora and mores

gets stuffed with it all:       the mildewed orange-flowers,

the female pills, the terrible breasts

of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.

Two handsome women, gripped in argument,

each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream

across the cut glass and majolica

like Furies cornered from their prey:

The argument ad feminam, all the old knives

that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours,

ma semblable, ma soeur!

4.

Knowing themselves too well in one another:

their gifts no pure fruition, but a thorn,

the prick filed sharp against a hint of scorn . . .

Reading while waiting

for the iron to heat,

writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—

in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum,

or, more often,

iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird,

dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life.

5.

Dulce ridens, dulce loquens,

she shaves her legs until they gleam

like petrified mammoth-tusk.

6.

When to her lute Corinna sings

neither words nor music are her own;

only the long hair dipping

over her cheek, only the song

of silk against her knees

and these

adjusted in reflections of an eye.

Poised, trembling and unsatisfied, before

an unlocked door, that cage of cages,

tell us, you bird, you tragical machine—

is this fertilisante douleur? Pinned down

by love, for you the only natural action,

are you edged more keen

to prise the secrets of the vault? has Nature shown

her household books to you, daughter-in-law,

that her sons never saw?

7.

“To have in this uncertain world some stay

which cannot be undermined, is

of the utmost consequence ”

Thus wrote

a woman, partly brave and partly good,

who fought with what she partly understood.

Few men about her would or could do more,

hence she was labelled harpy, shrew and whore.

8.

“You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot,

and turn part legend, part convention.

Still, eyes inaccurately dream

behind closed windows blankening with steam.

Deliciously, all that we might have been,

all that we were—fire, tears,

wit, taste, martyred ambition—

stirs like the memory of refused adultery

the drained and flagging bosom of our middle years.

9.

Not that it is done well, but

that it is done at all? Yes, think

of the odds! or shrug them off forever.

This luxury of the precocious child,

Time’s precious chronic invalid,—

would we, darlings, resign it if we could?

Our blight has been our sinecure:

mere talent was enough for us—

glitter in fragments and rough drafts.

Sigh no more, ladies.

Time is male

and in his cups drinks to the fair.

Bemused by gallantry, we hear

our mediocrities over-praised,

indolence read as abnegation,

slattern thought styled intuition,

every lapse forgiven, our crime

only to cast too bold a shadow

or smash the mould straight off.

For that, solitary confinement,

tear gas, attrition shelling.

Few applicants for that honor.

10.                                                     Well,

she’s long about her coming, who must be

more merciless to herself than history.

Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge

breasted and glancing through the currents,

taking the light upon her

at least as beautiful as any boy

or helicopter,

poised, still coming,

her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:

delivered

palpable

ours.

1958–1960

PASSING ON

The landlord’s hammer in the yard

patches a porch where your shirts swing

brashly against May’s creamy blue.

This year the forsythia ran wild,

chrome splashed on the spring evenings,

every bush a pile of sulphur.

Now, ragged, they bend

under the late wind’s onslaught, tousled

as my head beneath the clotheslines.

Soon we’ll be off. I’ll pack us into parcels,

stuff us in barrels, shroud us in newspapers,

pausing to marvel at old bargain sales:

Oh, all the chances we never seized!

Emptiness round the stoop of the house

minces, catwise, waiting for an in.

1959

THE RAVEN

If, antique hateful bird,

flapping through dawngagged streets

of metal shopfronts grated down

on pedestrian nerve-ends,

if, as on old film,

my features blurred and grained like cereal,

you find me walking up and down

waiting for my first dream,

don’t try to sully my head

with vengeful squirtings. Fly on,

ratfooted cautionary of my dark,

till we meet further along.

You are no dream, old genius.

I smell you, get my teeth on edge,

stand in my sweat—in mercury—

even as you prime your feathers and set sail.

1959

MERELY TO KNOW

I

Wedged in by earthworks

thrown up by snouters before me,

I kick and snuffle, breathing in

cobwebs of beetle-cuirass:

vainglory of polished green,

infallible pincer, resonant nerve,

a thickening on the air now,

confusion to my lungs, no more.

My predecessors blind me—

their zeal exhausted among roots and tunnels,

they gasped and looked up once or twice

into the beechtree’s nightblack glitter.

II

Let me take you by the hair

and drag you backward to the light,

there spongelike press my gaze

patiently upon your eyes,

hold like a photographic plate

against you my enormous question.

What if you cringe, what if you weep?

Suffer this and you need suffer

nothing more. I’ll give you back

yourself at last to the last part.

I take nothing, only look.

Change nothing. Have no need to change.

Merely to know and let you go.

1959

III

Spirit like water

moulded by unseen stone

and sandbar, pleats and funnels

according to its own

submerged necessity—

to the indolent eye

pure willfulness, to the stray

pine-needle boiling

in that cascade-bent pool

a random fury: Law,

if that’s what’s wanted, lies

asking to be read

in the dried brook-bed.

1961

ANTINOÜS: THE DIARIES

Autumn torture. The old signs

smeared on the pavement, sopping leaves

rubbed into the landscape as unguent on a bruise,

brought indoors, even, as they bring flowers, enormous,

with the colors of the body’s secret parts.

All this. And then, evenings, needing to be out,

walking fast, fighting the fire

that must die, light that sets my teeth on edge with joy,

till on the black embankment

I’m a cart stopped in the ruts of time.

Then at some house the rumor of truth and beauty

saturates a room like lilac-water

in the steam of a bath, fires snap, heads are high,

gold hair at napes of necks, gold in glasses,

gold in the throat, poetry of furs and manners.

Why do I shiver then? Haven’t I seen,

over and over, before the end of an evening,

the three opened coffins carried in and left in a corner?

Haven’t I watched as somebody cracked his shin

on one of them, winced and hopped and limped

laughing to lay his hand on a beautiful arm

striated with hairs of gold, like an almond-shell?

The old, needless story. For if I’m here

it is by choice and when at last

I smell my own rising nausea, feel the air

tighten around my stomach like a surgical bandage,

I can’t pretend surprise. What is it I so miscarry?

If what I spew on the tiles at last,

helpless, disgraced, alone,

is in part what I’ve swallowed from glasses, eyes,

motions of hands, opening and closing mouths,

isn’t it also dead gobbets of myself,

abortive, murdered, or never willed?

1959

JUVENILIA

Your Ibsen volumes, violet-spined,

each flaking its gold arabesque!

Again I sit, under duress, hands washed,

at your inkstained oaken desk,

by the goose-neck lamp in the tropic of your books,

stabbing the blotting-pad, doodling loop upon loop,

peering one-eyed in the dusty reflecting mirror

of your student microscope,

craning my neck to spell above me

A DOLLS HOUSE        LITTLE EYOLF

WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN

Unspeakable fairy tales ebb like blood through my head

as I dip the pen and for aunts, for admiring friends,

for you above all to read,

copy my praised and sedulous lines.

Behind the two of us, thirsty spines

quiver in semi-shadow, huge leaves uncurl and thicken.

1960

DOUBLE MONOLOGUE

To live illusionless, in the abandoned mine-

shaft of doubt, and still

mime illusions for others? A puzzle

for the maker who has thought

once too often too coldly.

Since I was more than a child

trying on a thousand faces

I have wanted one thing: to know

simply as I know my name

at any given moment, where I stand.

How much expense of time and skill

which might have set itself

to angelic fabrications! All merely

to chart one needle in the haymow?

Find yourself and you find the world?

Solemn presumption! Mighty Object

no one but itself has missed,

what’s lost, if you stay lost? Someone

ignorantly loves you—will that serve?

Shrug that off, and presto!—

the needle drowns in the haydust.

Think of the whole haystack—

a composition so fortuitous

it only looks monumental.

There’s always a straw twitching somewhere.

Wait out the long chance, and

your needle too could get nudged up

to the apex of that bristling calm.

Rusted, possibly. You might not want

to swear it was the Object, after all.

Time wears us old utopians.

I now no longer think

“truth” is the most beautiful of words.

Today, when I see “truthful”

written somewhere, it flares

like a white orchid in wet woods,

rare and grief-delighting, up from the page.

Sometimes, unwittingly even,

we have been truthful.

In a random universe, what more

exact and starry consolation?

Don’t think I think

facts serve better than ignorant love.

Both serve, and still

our need mocks our gear.

1960

A WOMAN MOURNED BY DAUGHTERS

Now, not a tear begun,

we sit here in your kitchen,

spent, you see, already.

You are swollen till you strain

this house and the whole sky.

You, whom we so often

succeeded in ignoring!

You are puffed up in death

like a corpse pulled from the sea

we groan beneath your weight.

And yet you were a leaf,

a straw blown on the bed,

you had long since become

crisp as a dead insect.

What is it, if not you,

that settles on us now

like satin you pulled down

over our bridal heads?

What rises in our throats

like food you prodded in?

Nothing could be enough.

You breathe upon us now

through solid assertions

of yourself: teaspoons, goblets,

seas of carpet, a forest

of old plants to be watered,

an old man in an adjoining

room to be touched and fed.

And all this universe

dares us to lay a finger

anywhere, save exactly

as you would wish it done.

1960

READINGS OF HISTORY

“He delighted in relating the fact that he had been born

near Girgenti in a place called Chaos during a raging

cholera epidemic.”

—DOMENICO VITTORINI, The Drama of Luigi Pirandello

I: The Evil Eye

Last night we sat with the stereopticon,

laughing at genre views of 1906,

till suddenly, gazing straight into

that fringed and tasselled parlor, where the vestal

spurns an unlikely suitor

with hairy-crested plants to right and left,

my heart sank. It was terrible.

I smelled the mildew in those swags of plush,

dust on the eyepiece bloomed to freaks of mould.

I knew beyond all doubt how dead that couple was.

Today, a fresh clean morning.

Your camera stabs me unawares,

right in my mortal part.

A womb of celluloid already

contains my dotage and my total absence.

II: The Confrontation

Luigi Pirandello

looked like an old historian

(oval head, tufted white beard,

not least the hunger

for reconciliation in his eye).

For fourteen years, facing

his criminal reflection

in his wife’s Grand Guignol mind,

he built over and over

that hall of mirrors

in which to be appears

to be perceived.

The present holds you like a raving wife,

clever as the mad are clever,

digging up your secret truths

from her disabled genius.

She knows what you hope

and dare not hope:

remembers

what you’re sick

of forgetting.

What are you now

but what you know together, you and she?

She will not let you think.

It is important

to make connections. Everything

happens very fast in the minds

of the insane. Even you

aren’t up to that, yet.

Go out, walk,

think of selves long past.

III: Memorabilia

I recall

Civil War letters of a great-grand-uncle,

fifteen at Chancellorsville,

no raconteur,

no speller, either; nor to put it squarely,

much of a mind;

the most we gather

is that he did write home:

I am well,

how are my sisters, hope you are the same.

Did Spartan battle-echoes rack his head?

Dying, he turned into his father’s memory.

History’s queerly strong perfumes

rise from the crook of this day’s elbow:

Seduction fantasies of the public mind,

or Dilthey’s dream from which he roused to see

the cosmos glaring through his windowpane?

Prisoners of what we think occurred,

or dreamers dreaming toward a final word?

What, in fact, happened in these woods

on some obliterated afternoon?

IV: Consanguinity

Can history show us nothing

but pieces of ourselves, detached,

set to a kind of poetry,

a kind of music, even?

Seated today on Grandmamma’s

plush sofa with the grapes

bursting so ripely from the curved mahogany,

we read the great Victorians

weeping, almost, as if

some family breach were healed.

Those angry giantesses and giants,

lately our kith and kin!

We stare into their faces, hear

at last what they were saying

(or some version not bruited

by filial irritation).

The cat-tails wither in the reading-room.

Tobacco-colored dust

drifts on the newest magazines.

I loaf here leafing ancient copies

of LIFE from World War II.

We look so poor and honest there:

girls with long hair badly combed

and unbecoming dresses—

where are you now?

You sail

to shop in Europe, ignorantly freed

for you, an age ago.

Your nylon luggage matches

eyelids

expertly azured.

I, too, have lived in history.

V: The Mirror

Is it in hopes

to find or lose myself

that I

fill up my table now

with Michelet and Motley?

To “know how it was”

or to forget how it is—

what else?

Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,

Yankee nor Rebel, born

in the face of two ancient cults,

I’m a good reader of histories.

And you,

Morris Cohen, dear to me as a brother,

when you sit at night

tracing your way through your volumes

of Josephus, or any

of the old Judaic chronicles,

do you find yourself there, a simpler,

more eloquent Jew?

or do you read

to shut out the tick-tock of self,

the questions and their routine answers?

VI: The Covenant

The present breaks our hearts. We lie and freeze,

our fingers icy as a bunch of keys.

Nothing will thaw these bones except

memory like an ancient blanket wrapped

about us when we sleep at home again,

smelling of picnics, closets, sicknesses,

old nightmare,

and insomnia’s spreading stain.

Or say I sit with what I halfway know

as with a dying man who heaves the true

version at last, now that it hardly matters,

or gropes a hand to where the letters

sewn in the mattress can be plucked and read.

Here’s water.        Sleep.        No more is asked of you.

I take your life into my living head.

1960

TO THE AIRPORT

Death’s taxi crackles through the mist. The cheeks

of diamond battlements flush high and cold.

Alarm clocks strike a million sparks of will.

Weeping:      all night we’ve wept and watched the hours

that never will be ours again: Now

weeping, we roll through unforgettable

Zion, that rears its golden head from sleep

to act, and does not need us as we weep.

You dreamed us, City, and you let us be.

Grandiloquence, improvidence, ordure, light,

hours that seemed years, and ours—and over all

the endless wing of possibility,

that mackerel heaven of yours, fretted with all

our wits could leap for, envy batten on.

Our flights take off from you into the sea;

nothing you need wastes, though we think we do.

You are Canaan now and we are lifted high

to see all we were promised, never knew.

1960

THE AFTERWAKE

Nursing your nerves

to rest, I’ve roused my own; well,

now for a few bad hours!

Sleep sees you behind closed doors.

Alone, I slump in his front parlor.

You’re safe inside. Good. But I’m

like a midwife who at dawn

has all in order: bloodstains

washed up, teapot on the stove,

and starts her five miles home

walking, the birthyell still

exploding in her head.

Yes, I’m with her now: here’s

the streaked, livid road

edged with shut houses

breathing night out and in.

Legs tight with fatigue,

we move under morning’s coal-blue star,

colossal as this load

of unexpired purpose, which drains

slowly, till scissors of cockcrow snip the air.

1961

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

—to GPS—

Over the chessboard now,

Your Artificiality concludes

a final check; rests; broods—

no—sorts and stacks a file of memories,

while I

concede the victory, bow,

and slouch among my free associations.

You never had a mother,

let’s say? no digital Gertrude

whom you’d as lief have seen

Kingless? So your White Queen

was just an “operator."

(My Red had incandescence,

ire, aura, flare,

and trapped me several moments in her stare.)

I’m sulking, clearly, in the great tradition

of human waste. Why not

dump the whole reeking snarl

and let you solve me once for all?

(Parameter: a black-faced Luddite

itching for ecstasies of sabotage.)

Still, when

they make you write your poems, later on,

who’d envy you, force-fed

on all those variorum

editions of our primitive endeavors,

those frozen pemmican language-rations

they’ll cram you with? denied

our luxury of nausea, you

forget nothing, have no dreams.

1961

A MARRIAGE IN THE ’SIXTIES

As solid-seeming as antiquity,

you frown above

the New York Sunday Times

where Castro, like a walk-on out of Carmen,

mutters into a bearded henchman’s ear.

They say the second’s getting shorter—

I knew it in my bones—

and pieces of the universe are missing.

I feel the gears of this late afternoon

slip, cog by cog, even as I read.

“I’m old” we both complain,

half-laughing, oftener now.

Time serves you well. That face—

part Roman emperor, part Raimu—

nothing this side of Absence can undo.

Bliss, revulsion, your rare angers can

only carry through what’s well begun.

When

I read your letters long ago

in that half-defunct

hotel in Magdalen Street

every word primed my nerves.

A geographical misery

composed of oceans, fogbound planes

and misdelivered cablegrams

lay round me, a Nova Zembla

only your live breath could unfreeze.

Today we stalk

in the raging desert of our thought

whose single drop of mercy is

each knows the other there.

Two strangers, thrust for life upon a rock,

may have at last the perfect hour of talk

that language aches for; still—

two minds, two messages.

Your brows knit into flourishes. Some piece

of mere time has you tangled there.

Some mote of history has flown into your eye.

Will nothing ever be the same,

even our quarrels take a different key,

our dreams exhume new metaphors?

The world breathes underneath our bed.

Don’t look. We’re at each other’s mercy too.

Dear fellow-particle, electric dust

I’m blown with—ancestor

to what euphoric cluster—

see how particularity dissolves

in all that hints of chaos. Let one finger

hover toward you from There

and see this furious grain

suspend its dance to hang

beside you like your twin.

1961

FIRST THINGS

I can’t name love now

without naming its object—

this the final measure

of those flintspark years

when one believed

one’s flash innate.

Today I swear

only in the sun’s eye

do I take fire.

1961

ATTENTION

The ice age is here.

I sit burning cigarettes,

burning my brain.

A micro-Tibet,

deadly, frivolous, complete,

blinds the four panes.

Veils of dumb air

unwind like bandages

from my lips

half-parted, steady as the mouths

of antique statues.

1961

END OF AN ERA

This morning, flakes of sun

peel down to the last snowholds,

the barbed-wire leavings of a war

lost, won, in these dead-end alleys.

Stale as a written-out journalist,

I sort my gear.—Nothing is happening.—City,

dumb as a pack of thumbed cards, you

once had snap and glare

and secret life; now, trembling

under my five grey senses’ weight,

you flatten

onto the table.

Baudelaire, I think of you . . . Nothing changes,

rude and self-absorbed the current

dashes past, reflecting nothing, poetry

extends its unsought amnesty,

the roots of the great grove

atrophy underground.

Some voices, though, shake in the air like heat.

The neighborhood is changing,

even the neighbors are grown, methinks, peculiar.

I walk into my house and see

tourists fingering this and that.

My mirrors, my bric-à-brac

don’t suit their style.

Those old friends, though,

alive and dead,

for whom things don’t come easy—

Certain forests are sawdust,

from now on have to be described?

Nothing changes.     The bones of the mammoths

are still in the earth.

1961

RUSTICATION

In a gigantic pot de chambre, scrolled

with roses, purchased dearly at auction,

goldenrod and asters spill

toward the inevitable sunset.

The houseguests trail from swimming

under huge towels.

Marianne dangles barefoot in the hammock

reading about Martin Luther King.

Vivaldi rattles on the phonograph,

flutes ricocheting off the birchtrees.

Flies buzz and are gaily murdered.

Still out of it, and guilty,

I glue the distance-glasses to my eyes

ostrich-like, hoping

you’ll think me in that clearing half a mile away.

Offstage I hear

the old time-killers dressing, banging doors,

your voice, a timbre or two too rich for love,

cheering them on.

A kestrel sails into my field of vision,

clear as a rising star.

Why should I need to quarrel

with another’s consolations?

Why, in your mortal skin,

vigorously smashing ice and smoking,

a graying pigtail down your back,

should you seem infamous to me?

1961

APOLOGY

I’ve said: I wouldn’t ever

keep a cat, a dog,

a bird—

chiefly because

I’d rather love my equals.

Today, turning

in the fog of my mind,

I knew, the thing I really

couldn’t stand in the house

is a woman

with a mindful of fog

and bloodletting claws

and the nerves of a bird

and the nightmares of a dog.

1961

SISTERS

Can I easily say,

I know you of course now,

no longer the fellow-victim,

reader of my diaries, heir

to my outgrown dresses,

ear for my poems and invectives?

Do I know you better

than that blue-eyed stranger

self-absorbed as myself

raptly knittting or sleeping

through a thirdclass winter journey?

Face to face all night

her dreams and whimpers

tangled with mine,

sleeping but not asleep

behind the engine drilling

into dark Germany,

her eyes, mouth, head

reconstructed by dawn

as we nodded farewell.

Her I should recognize

years later, anywhere.

1961

IN THE NORTH

Mulish, unregenerate,

not “as all men are”

but more than most

you sit up there in the sunset;

there are only three

hours of dark

in your night. You are

alone as an old king

with his white-gold beard

when in summer the ships

sail out, the heroes

singing, push off

for other lands. Only

in winter when

trapped in the ice

your kingdom flashes

under the northern lights

and the bees dream

in their hives, the young

men like the bees

hang near you

for lack of another,

remembering too, with some

remorseful tenderness

you are their king.

1962

PEELING ONIONS

Only to have a grief

equal to all these tears!

There’s not a sob in my chest.

Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt

I pare away, no hero,

merely a cook.

Crying was labor, once

when I’d good cause.

Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds

raw in my head,

so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.

A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain—

yet all that stayed

stuffed in my lungs like smog.

These old tears in the chopping-bowl.

1961

GHOST OF A CHANCE

You see a man

trying to think.

You want to say

to everything:

Keep off! Give him room!

But you only watch,

terrified

the old consolations

will get him at last

like a fish

half-dead from flopping

and almost crawling

across the shingle,

almost breathing

the raw, agonizing

air

till a wave

pulls it back blind into the triumphant

sea.

1962

THE WELL

Down this old well

what leaves have fallen,

what cores of eaten apples,

what scraps of paper!

An old trash barrel.

November, no one comes.

But I come, trying

to breathe that word

into the well’s ear

which could make the leaves fly up

like a green jet

to clothe the naked tree,

the whole fruit leap to the bough,

the scraps like fleets of letters

sail up into my hands.

Leiden, 1961

NOVELLA

Two people in a room, speaking harshly.

One gets up, goes out to walk.

(That is the man.)

The other goes into the next room

and washes the dishes, cracking one.

(That is the woman.)

It gets dark outside.

The children quarrel in the attic.

She has no blood left in her heart.

The man comes back to a dark house.

The only light is in the attic.

He has forgotten his key.

He rings at his own door

and hears sobbing on the stairs.

The lights go on in the house.

The door closes behind him.

Outside, separate as minds,

the stars too come alight.

1962

FACE

I could look at you a long time,

man of red and blue;

your eye glows mockingly

from the rainbow-colored flesh

Karel Appel clothed you in.

You are a fish,

drawn up dripping hugely

from the sea of paint,

laid on the canvas

to glower and flash

out of the blackness

that is your true element.

1962

PROSPECTIVE IMMIGRANTS PLEASE NOTE

Either you will

go through this door

or you will not go through.

If you go through

there is always die risk

of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly

and you must look back

and let them happen.

If you do not go through

it is possible

to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes

to hold your position

to die bravely

but much will blind you,

much will evade you,

at what cost who knows?

The door itself

makes no promises.

It is only a door.

1962

LIKENESS

A good man

is an odd thing:

hard to find

as the song says,

he is anarchic

as a mountain freshet

and unprotected

by the protectors.

1962

ALWAYS THE SAME

Slowly, Prometheus

bleeds to life

in his huge loneliness.

You, for whom

his bowels are exposed,

go about your affairs

dying a little every day

from the inside out

almost imperceptibly

till the late decades when

women go hysterical

and men are dumbly frightened

and far away, like the sea

Prometheus sings on

“like a battle-song after a battle.”

1962

PEACE

Lashes of white light

binding another hailcloud—

the whole onset all over

bursting against our faces,

sputtering like dead holly

fired in a grate:

And the birds go mad

potted by grapeshot

while the sun shines

in one quarter of heaven

and the rainbow

breaks out its enormous flag—

oily, unnegotiable—

over the sack-draped backs

of the cattle in their kingdom.

1961

THE ROOFWALKER

for Denise

Over the half-finished houses

night comes. The builders

stand on the roof. It is

quiet after the hammers,

the pulleys hang slack.

Giants, the roofwalkers,

on a listing deck, the wave

of darkness about to break

on their heads. The sky

is a torn sail where figures

pass magnified, shadows

on a burning deck.

I feel like them up there:

exposed, larger than life,

and due to break my neck.

Was it worth while to lay—

with infinite exertion—

a roof I can’t live under?

—All those blueprints,

closings of gaps,

measurings, calculations?

A life I didn’t choose

chose me: even

my tools are the wrong ones

for what I have to do.

I’m naked, ignorant,

a naked man fleeing

across the roofs

who could with a shade of difference

be sitting in the lamplight

against the cream wallpaper

reading—not with indifference—

about a naked man

fleeing across the roofs.

1961

NOTES ON THE POEMS

”SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW”

4. “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, ed. T. H. Johnson, 1960, p. 369.

7. “. . . is of the utmost consequence,” from Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, London, 1787.

8. “Vous mourez toutes à quinze ans,” from the Lettres à Sophie Volland, quoted by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. II, pp. 123–4.

10. Cf. Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. II, p. 574: “. . . elle arrive du fond des ages, de Thèbes, de Minos, de Chichen Itza; et elle est aussi le totem planté au coeur de la brousse africaine; c’est un helicoptère et c’est un oiseau; et voilà la plus grande merveille: sous ses cheveux peints le bruissement des feuillages devient une pensée et des paroles s’échappent de ses seins.”

”ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE”

See Herbert Simon, The New Science of Management Decision, p. 26. “A General Problem-Solving Program: Computer programs have been written that enable computers to discover proofs for theorems in logic or geometry, to play chess, to design motors . . . to compose music . . . From almost all of them, whether intended as simulations [of human processes] or not, we learn something about human problem solving, thinking, and learning.

“The first thing we learn . . . is that we can explain these human processes without postulating mechanisms at subconscious levels that are different from those that are partly conscious and partly verbalized. . . . The secret of problem solving is that there is no secret.”

”ALWAYS THE SAME”

The last line is quoted from D. H. Lawrence, letter to Henry Savage, in The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, vol. I, p. 258.

First published in 1963, this book is now restored to print in a new edition containing some revisions and one hitherto unpublished poem.

“The risk this book quietly takes, and impressively fulfills, is no less than to get life said. . . . Newly freed from the metrical conventions of her earlier books, Adrienne Rich has lost none of her perfect pitch for the tones of language itself.”

— Philip Booth

The Christian Science Monitor

By the same author

NECESSITIES OF LIFE

THE DIAMOND CUTTERS

A CHANGE OF WORLD

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

Some of the poems in this book first appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Critical Quarterly (Great Britain), Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poems in Folio, Portfolio and Art News Annual, New Poets of England and America No. 2, and Penguin Anthology of Modem American Poetry. “At Majority” and “From Morning-Glory to Petersburg” appeared originally in The New Yorker. “Readings of History” was presented as the 1960 Phi Beta Kappa poem at the College of William and Mary.

Copyright © 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1967,

by Adrienne Rich Conrad.

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 67-24016

All Rights Reserved

Published simultaneously in Canada by

George J. McLeod Limited, Toronto

ISBN 978-0-393-04146-0

ISBN 978-0-393-34812-5 (e-book)

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Contents

At Majority

From Morning-Glory to Petersburg

Rural Reflections

The Knight

The Loser

The Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame

Euryclea’s Tale

September 21

After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge”

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Passing On

The Raven

Merely to Know

Antinoüs: The Diaries

Juvenilia

Double Monologue

A Woman Mourned by Daughters

Readings of History

To the Airport

The Afterwake

Artificial Intelligence

A Marriage in the ’sixties

First Things

Attention

End of an Era

Rustication

Apology

Sisters

In the North

Peeling Onions

Ghost of a Chance

The Well

Novella

Face

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Likeness

Always the Same

Peace

The Roofwalker

Notes on the Poems

Praise for SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

Also by Adrienne Rich

About the Author

Copyright