COLLECTED POEMS
1950-2012
ADRIENNE
RICH
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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
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
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)
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
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