Collected Poems by Rich, Adrienne -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Cover Title Contents Introduction by Claudia Rankine Editor’s Note A Change of World (1951)

Storm Warnings Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers Vertigo The Ultimate Act What Ghosts Can Say The Kursaal at Interlaken Reliquary Purely Local A View of the Terrace By No Means Native Air without Incense For the Felling of an Elm in the Harvard Yard A Clock in the Square Why Else But to Forestall This Hour This Beast, This Angel Eastport to Block Island At a Deathbed in the Year Two Thousand Afterward The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room Boundary Five O’Clock, Beacon Hill From a Chapter on Literature An Unsaid Word Mathilde in Normandy At a Bach Concert The Rain of Blood Stepping Backward Itinerary A Revivalist in Boston The Return of the Evening Grosbeaks The Springboard A Change of World Unsounded Design in Living Colors Walden 1950 Sunday Evening The Innocents “He Remembereth That We Are Dust” Life and Letters For the Conjunction of Two Planets

Poems (1950–1951)

The Prisoners Night The House at the Cascades

The Diamond Cutters (1955)

The Roadway Pictures by Vuillard Orient Wheat Versailles Annotation for an Epitaph Ideal Landscape The Celebration in the Plaza The Tourist and the Town Bears The Insusceptibles Lucifer in the Train Recorders in Italy At Hertford House The Wild Sky The Prospect Epilogue for a Masque of Purcell Villa Adriana The Explorers Landscape of the Star Letter from the Land of Sinners Concord River Apology Living in Sin Autumn Equinox The Strayed Village The Perennial Answer The Insomniacs The Snow Queen Love in the Museum I Heard a Hermit Speak Colophon A Walk by the Charles New Year Morning In Time of Carnival The Middle-Aged The Marriage Portion The Tree Lovers Are Like Children When This Clangor in the Brain A View of Merton College Holiday The Capital The Platform Last Song The Diamond Cutters

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)

At Majority From Morning-Glory to Petersburg Rural Reflections The Knight The Loser

I. I kissed you, bride and lost, and went II. Well, you are tougher than I thought.

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

1. You, once a belle in Shreveport, 2. Banging the coffee-pot into the sink 3. A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. 4. Knowing themselves too well in one another: 5. Dulce ridens, dulce loquens, 6. When to her lute Corinna sings 7. “To have in this uncertain world some stay 8. “You all die at fifteen,” said Diderot, 9. Not that it is done well, but 10. Well,

Passing On The Raven Merely to Know

I. Wedged in by earthworks II. Let me take you by the hair III. Spirit like water

Antinoüs: The Diaries Juvenilia Double Monologue A Woman Mourned by Daughters Readings of History

I. The Evil Eye II. The Confrontation III. Memorabilia IV. Consanguinity V. The Mirror VI. The Covenant

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 The Classmate Peeling Onions Ghost of a Chance The Well Novella Face Prospective Immigrants Please Note Likeness The Lag Always the Same Peace The Roofwalker

Poems (1955–1957)

At the Jewish New Year Moving in Winter

Necessities of Life (1966)

Part One: Poems 1962–1965

Necessities of Life In the Woods The Corpse-Plant The Trees Like This Together

1. Wind rocks the car. 2. They’re tearing down, tearing up 3. We have, as they say, 4. Our words misunderstand us. 5. Dead winter doesn’t die,

Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York Open-Air Museum Two Songs

1. Sex, as they harshly call it, 2. That “old last act”!

The Parting Night-Pieces: For a Child

The Crib Her Waking

The Stranger After Dark

I. You are falling asleep and I sit looking at you II. Now let’s away from prison—

Mourning Picture “I Am in Danger—Sir—” Halfway Autumn Sequence

1. An old shoe, an old pot, an old skin, 2. Still, a sweetness hardly earned 3. Your flag is dried-blood, turkey-comb 4. Skin of wet leaves on asphalt.

Noon Not Like That The Knot Any Husband to Any Wife Side by Side Spring Thunder

1. Thunder is all it is, and yet 2. Whatever you are that weeps 3. The power of the dinosaur 4. A soldier is here, an ancient figure, 5. Over him, over you, a great roof is rising,

Moth Hour Focus Face to Face

Part Two: Translations from the Dutch

Martinus Nijhoff, The Song of the Foolish Bees Hendrik de Vries, My Brother Hendrik de Vries, Fever Gerrit Achterberg, Eben Haëzer Gerrit Achterberg, Accountability Gerrit Achterberg, Statue Leo Vroman, Our Family Chr. J. van Geel, Homecoming Chr. J. van Geel, Sleepwalking

Poems (1962–1965)

To Judith, Taking Leave Roots The Parting: II Winter

Leaflets (1969)

Part One: Night Watch

Orion Holding Out Flesh and Blood In the Evening Missing the Point City (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg) Dwingelo (from the Dutch of Gerrit Achterberg) The Demon Lover Jerusalem Charleston in the 1860’s Night Watch There Are Such Springlike Nights (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky) For a Russian Poet

1. The Winter Dream 2. Summer in the Country 3. The Demonstration

Night in the Kitchen 5:30 A.M. The Break Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova)

1. There’s a secret boundary hidden in the waving grasses: 2. On the terrace, violins played

The Key Picnic The Book Abnegation

Part Two: Leaflets

Women Implosions To Frantz Fanon Continuum On Edges Violence The Observer Nightbreak Gabriel Leaflets

1. The big star, and that other 2. Your face 3. If, says the Dahomeyan devil, 4. Crusaders’ wind glinting 5. The strain of being born

The Rafts

Part Three: Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)

The clouds are electric in this university. The ones who camped on the slopes, below the bare summit, In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice. Did you think I was talking about my life? Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever— When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed Armitage of scrapiron for the radiations of a moon. When your sperm enters me, it is altered; The sapling springs, the milkweed blooms: obsolete Nature. The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death. Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry. A dead mosquito, flattened against a door; So many minds in search of bodies The order of the small town on the riverbank, If these are letters, they will have to be misread. From here on, all of us will be living A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design,

Poems (1967–1969)

Postcard White Night (from the Yiddish of Kadia Molodowsky) The Days: Spring Tear Gas

The Will to Change (1971)

November 1968 Study of History Planetarium The Burning of Paper Instead of Children

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, … 2. To imagine a time of silence 3. “People suffer highly in poverty … 4. We lie under the sheet 5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, …

I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus The Blue Ghazals

Violently asleep in the old house. One day of equinoctial light after another, A man, a woman, a city. Ideas of order … Sinner of the Florida keys, Late at night I went walking through your difficult wood, They say, if you can tell, clasped tight under the blanket, There are days when I seem to have nothing Frost, burning. The city’s ill. Pain made her conservative.

Pierrot Le Fou

1. Suppose you stood facing 2. On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles. 3. Suppose we had time 4. The island blistered our feet. 5. When I close my eyes 6. To record

Letters: March 1969

1. Foreknown. The victor 2. Hopes sparkle like water in the clean carafe. 3. “I am up at sunrise 4. Six months back

Pieces

1. Breakpoint 2. Relevance 3. Memory 4. Time and Place 5. Revelation

Our Whole Life Your Letter Stand Up The Stelae Snow The Will to Change

1. That Chinese restaurant was a joke 2. Knocked down in the canefield 3. Beardless again, phoning 4. At the wings of the mirror, peacock plumes 5. The cabdriver from the Bronx

The Photograph of the Unmade Bed Images for Godard

1. Language as city: : Wittgenstein 2. To know the extremes of light 3. To love, to move perpetually 4. At the end of Alphaville 5. Interior monologue of the poet:

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning Shooting Script Part I: 11/69–2/70

1. We were bound on the wheel of an endless conversation. 2. Ghazal V (adapted from Mirza Ghalib) 3. The old blanket. The crumbs of rubbed wool turning up. 4. In my imagination I was the pivot of a fresh beginning. 5. Of simple choice they are the villagers; … 6. You are beside me like a wall; … 7. Picking the wax to crumbs …

Part II: 3–7/70

8. A woman waking behind grimed blinds … 9. (Newsreel) 10. They come to you with their descriptions of your soul. 11. The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life. 12. I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations. 13. We are driven to odd attempts; … 14. Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier …

Diving into the Wreck (1971–1972)

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

The Phenomenology of Anger

III.

Merced A Primary Ground Translations Living in a 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

Meditations for a Savage Child

Poems (1973–1974)

Dien Bien Phu Essential Resources Blood-Sister The Wave Re-forming the Crystal The Fourth Month of the Landscape Architect The Alleged Murderess Walking in Her Cell White Night Amnesia For L.G.: Unseen for Twenty Years Family Romance From an Old House in America The Fact of a Doorframe

The Dream of a Common Language (1974–1977)

I. POWER

Power Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev Origins and History of Consciousness Splittings Hunger To a Poet Cartographies of Silence The Lioness

II. Twenty-One Love Poems

I. Wherever in this city, screens flicker II. I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming. III. Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time IV. I come home from you through the early light of spring V. This apartment full of books could crack open VI. Your small hands, precisely equal to my own— VII. What kind of beast would turn its life into words? VIII. I can see myself years back at Sunion, IX. Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live X. Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through XI. Every peak is a crater. This is the law of volcanoes, XII. Sleeping, turning in turn like planets XIII. The rules break like a thermometer, XIV. It was your vision of the pilot (The Floating Poem, Unnumbered) XV. If I lay on that beach with you XVI. Across a city from you, I’m with you, XVII. No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. XVIII. Rain on the West Side Highway, XIX. Can it be growing colder when I begin XX. That conversation we were always on the edge XXI. The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones

III. Not Somewhere Else, but Here

Not Somewhere Else, But Here Upper Broadway Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff Nights and Days Sibling Mysteries A Woman Dead in Her Forties Mother-Right Natural Resources Toward the Solstice Transcendental Etude

A Wild Patience has Taken me this Far (1978–1981)

The Images Coast to Coast Integrity Culture and Anarchy For Julia in Nebraska Transit For Memory What Is Possible For Ethel Rosenberg Mother-in-Law Heroines Grandmothers

1. Mary Gravely Jones 2. Hattie Rice Rich 3. Granddaughter

The Spirit of Place

I. Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett II. The mountain laurel in bloom III. Strangers are an endangered species IV. The river-fog will do for privacy V. Orion plunges like a drunken hunter

Frame Rift A Vision Turning the Wheel

1. Location 2. Burden Baskets 3. Hohokam 4. Self-hatred 5. Particularity 6. Apparition 7. Mary Jane Colter, 1904 8. Turning the Wheel

Your Native Land, Your Life (1981–1985)

I. Sources

Sources

II. North American Time

For the Record North American Time Education of a Novelist Virginia 1906 Dreams Before Waking When/Then Upcountry One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem In the Wake of Home What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be For an Occupant Emily Carr Poetry: I Poetry: II, Chicago Poetry: III Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties New York Homage to Winter Blue Rock Yom Kippur 1984 Edges

III. Contradictions: Tracking Poems

1. Look: this is January the worst onslaught 2. Heart of cold. Bones of cold. Scalp of cold 3. My mouth hovers across your breasts 4. He slammed his hand across my face and I 5. She is carrying my madness and I dread her 6. Dear Adrienne: I’m calling you up tonight 7. Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain 8. I’m afraid of prison. Have been all these years. 9. Tearing but not yet torn: this page 10. Night over the great and the little worlds 11. I came out of the hospital like a woman 12. Violence as purification: the one idea. 13. Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings, 14. Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences 15. You who think I find words for everything, 16. It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived 17. I have backroads I take to places 18. The problem, unstated till now, is how 19. If to feel is to be unreliable 20. The tobacco fields lie fallow the migrant pickers 21. The cat-tails blaze in the corner sunflowers 22. In a bald skull sits our friend in a helmet 23. You know the Government must have pushed them to settle, 24. Someone said to me: It’s just that we don’t 25. Did anyone ever know who we were 26. You: air-driven reft from the tuber-bitten soil 27. The Tolstoyans the Afro-American slaves 28. This high summer we love will pour its light 29. You who think I find words for everything

Time’s Power (1985–1988)

Solfeggietto This Love Poem Negotiations In a Classroom The Novel A Story In Memoriam: D.K. Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest Sleepwalking Next to Death Letters in the Family The Desert as Garden of Paradise Delta 6/21 For an Album Dreamwood Walking Down the Road The Slides Harpers Ferry One Life Divisions of Labor Living Memory Turning

An Atlas of the Difficult World (1988–1991)

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

Dark Fields of the Republic (1991–1995)

What Kind of Times are These

What Kind of Times Are These In Those Years To the Days Miracle Ice Cream Rachel Amends Calle Visión

1. Not what you thought: just a turn-off 2. Calle Visión sand in your teeth 3. Lodged in the difficult hotel 4. Calle Visión your heart beats on unbroken 5. Ammonia 6. The repetitive motions of slaughtering 7. You can call on beauty still and it will leap 8. In the room in the house 9. In the black net 10. On the road there is a house

Reversion Revolution in Permanence (1953, 1993)

Then or Now

Food Packages: 1947 Innocence: 1945 Sunset, December, 1993 Deportations And Now Sending Love

Voice Sending love: Molly sends it Sending love is harmless Terrence years ago

Take Late Ghazal Six Narratives

1. You drew up the story of your life 2. You drew up a story about me 3. You were telling a story about women to young men 4. You were telling a story about love 5. I was telling you a story about love 6. You were telling a story about war

From Piercéd Darkness

Inscriptions

One: comrade Two: movement Three: origins Four: history Five: voices Six: edgelit

Midnight Salvage (1995–1998)

The Art of Translation For an Anniversary Midnight Salvage Char Modotti Shattered Head 1941 Letters to a Young Poet Camino Real Plaza Street and Flatbush Seven Skins “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” Rusted Legacy A Long Conversation

Fox (1998–2000)

Victory Veterans Day For This Regardless Signatures Nora’s Gaze Architect Fox Messages Fire Twilight Octobrish Second Sight Grating Noctilucent Clouds If Your Name Is on the List 1999 Terza Rima Four Short Poems Rauschenberg’s Bed Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot Ends of the Earth

The School Among the Ruins (2000–2004)

Centaur’s Requiem Equinox Tell Me For June, in the Year 2001 The School Among the Ruins This evening let’s Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet Delivered Clean The Eye There Is No One Story and One Story Only

II.

USonian Journals 2000

III. Territory Shared

Address Transparencies Livresque Collaborations Ritual Acts Point in Time

IV. Alternating Current

Sometimes I’m back in that city No bad dreams. Night, the bed, the faint clockface. Take one, take two What’s suffered in laughter in aroused afternoons A deluxe blending machine As finally by wind or grass When we are shaken out

Memorize This The Painter’s House After Apollinaire & Brassens Slashes Trace Elements Bract

VI. Dislocations: Seven Scenarios

1 Still learning the word 2 In a vast dystopic space the small things 3 City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker 4 For recalcitrancy of attitude 5 Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain 6 Not to get up and go back to the drafting table 7 Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment

VII.

Five O’Clock, January 2003 Wait Don’t Take Me To Have Written the Truth Screen Door

VIII. Tendril

Tendril

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2004–2006)

Voyage to the Denouement Calibrations Skeleton Key Wallpaper In Plain Sight Behind the Motel Melancholy Piano (extracts)

II.

Archaic Long After Stevens Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme” Rhyme Hotel Three Elegies

I. Late Style II. As Ever III. Fallen Figure

Hubble Photographs: After Sappho This Is Not the Room Unknown Quantity Tactile Value Midnight, the Same Day

I. When the sun seals my eyes the emblem II. Try to rest now, says a voice

Even Then Maybe Director’s Notes Rereading The Dead Lecturer

III.

Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender, or Judged Unfit to Send

IV.

If/As Though Time Exposures

I. Glance into glittering moisture II. Is there a doctor in the house III. They’d say she was humorless IV. When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking V. You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog

The University Reopens as the Floods Recede Via Insomnia A Burning Kangaroo Ever, Again

Draft #2006

VI.

Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth

Tonight no Poetry Will Serve (2007–2010)

Waiting for Rain, for Music Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time Benjamin Revisited Innocence Domain Fracture Turbulence Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

II.

Scenes of Negotiation

III.

From Sickbed Shores

IV. Axel Avákar

Axel Avákar Axel: backstory Axel, in thunder I was there, Axel Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house

Ballade of the Poverties Emergency Clinic Confrontations Circum/Stances Winterface Quarto Don’t Flinch Black Locket Generosity

VI.

You, Again Powers of Recuperation

Later Poems (2010–2012)

Itinerary For the Young Anarchists Fragments of an Opera Liberté Teethsucking Bird Undesigned Suspended Lines Tracings From Strata Endpapers

Notes on the Poems Index of Titles and First Lines Also by Adrienne Rich Copyright

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