Later Poems:
Selected and New
1971 – 2012
ADRIENNE RICH
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Also by Adrienne Rich
Diving into the Wreck (1971–1972)
Trying to Talk with a Man
When We Dead Awaken
Incipience
The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One
From the Prison House
Diving into the Wreck
The Phenomenology of Anger
For a Sister
For the Dead
Meditations for a Savage Child
The Dream of a Common Language (1974–1977)
Power
Origins and History of Consciousness
Hunger
Cartographies of Silence
Twenty-one Love Poems
Upper Broadway
Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff
A Woman Dead in Her Forties
Toward the Solstice
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1978–1981)
Coast to Coast
Integrity
Transit
For Memory
What Is Possible
For Ethel Rosenberg
Heroines
Grandmothers
The Spirit of Place
Frame
A Vision
Your Native Land, Your Life (1981–1985)
Sources
For the Record
North American Time
Virginia 1906
Dreams Before Waking
One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem
What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be
Poetry: I; II, Chicago; III
Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties
Homage to Winter
Blue Rock
Yom Kippur 1984
Edges
Contradictions: Tracking Poems
Time’s Power (1985–1988)
Solfeggietto
This
Negotiations
In a Classroom
The Novel
In Memoriam: D.K.
Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest
Sleepwalking Next to Death
Delta
6/21
Dreamwood
Harpers Ferry
Living Memory
An Atlas of the Difficult World (1988–1991)
An Atlas of the Difficult World
That Mouth
Marghanita
Tattered Kaddish
Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud
Darklight
For a Friend in Travail
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
Reversion
Then or Now
Food Packages: 1947
Innocence: 1945
Sunset, December, 1993
Deportations
And Now
Six Narratives
1. You drew up the story of your life I was in that story
2. You drew up a story about me I fled that story
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 it is our story
Inscriptions
One: comrade
Two: movement
Three: origins
Four: history
Five: voices
Six: edgelit
Midnight Salvage (1995–1998)
The Art of Translation
Midnight Salvage
Char
Modotti
Shattered Head
Letters to a Young Poet
Camino Real
Seven Skins
Rusted Legacy
A Long Conversation
Fox (1998–2000)
Victory
For This
Regardless
Architect
Fox
Messages
Fire
Grating
Noctilucent Clouds
If Your Name Is on the List
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
The School Among the Ruins
This Evening Let’s
There Is No One Story and One Story Only
Usonian Journals 2000
Transparencies
Ritual Acts
Alternating Current
Dislocations: Seven Scenarios
Wait
Screen Door
Tendril
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2004–2006)
Voyage to the Denouement
Calibrations
Wallpaper
In Plain Sight
Behind the Motel
Archaic
Long After Stevens
Rhyme
Hubble Photographs: After Sappho
This Is Not the Room
Unknown Quantity
Tactile Value
Director’s Notes
Rereading The Dead Lecturer
Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send
The University Reopens as the Floods Recede
Draft #2006
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
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
Scenes of Negotiation
From Sickbed Shores
Axel Avákar
Ballade of the Poverties
Emergency Clinic
Confrontations
Circum/Stances
Winterface
Quarto
Black Locket
Generosity
Powers of Recuperation
New and Unpublished 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
Acknowledgments
Index of Titles and First Lines
Copyright
These selections were chosen by Adrienne Rich before her death.
The volume was assembled by her editor, and in creating the collection some reformatting of pages was necessary.
Also by Adrienne Rich
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010
A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 1997–2008
Poetry & Commitment: An Essay
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006
The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2000
Fox: Poems 1998–2000
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
Midnight Sa
lvage: Poems 1995–1998
Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995
Collected Early Poems 1950–1970
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991
Time’s Power: Poems 1985–1988
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985
Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems
Sources
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977
Twenty-one Love Poems
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972
The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970
Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968
Necessities of Life
The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems
A Change of World
Diving into the Wreck
* * *
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
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
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
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 emptin
ess
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