Poem of the Day

We haven’t heard from Adrienne Rich in a while. I might also take this opportunity to highly recommend Eve Curie’s biography of her famous mother Marie, entitled Madame Curie. She was an amazing woman and it’s a wonderful story.

Power
By Adrienne Rich

Living   in the earth-deposits   of our history

Today a backhoe divulged   out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle   amber   perfect   a hundred-year-old
cure for fever   or melancholy   a tonic
for living on this earth   in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered   from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years   by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin   of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold   a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman   denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds   came   from the same source as her power

Current Tea: wedding chai (Indian black tea blended with cardamom and vanilla)

I do love Adrienne Rich’s poetry… My grandfather came to the U.S. from Greece (to attend Princeton) in 1924 and went through Ellis Island. He wrote letters to his teachers/benefactors in Greece and said he had a pleasant experience. I wrote a paper my freshman year in high school on misconceptions about Ellis Island. I imagine if I repeated the endeavor I’d be more thorough. (ha ha ha)

Prospective Immigrants Please Note
By Adrienne Rich

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the 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.

Current Tea: captivating caramel (black tea with caramel flavoring)

Ha ha ha. I’ve been saving this one for months and months, so I could post it today. Happy new year!

New Year Morning
By Adrienne Rich

The bells have quit their clanging; here beneath
The coldly furious streaks of morning stars
We hear the scraping of the last few cars,
And on the doorstep by the frozen wreath
Return goodnights to night. Dear friends, once more
We’ve held our strength against a straining door,

Again the siege is past, another year
Has lost the battle. You can leave us now.
The hours are done that must be clamored through
Lest darkness think us sleeping, lest we hear
Secret police engendered out of night
Advancing on our little zone of light.

Now each of us can dare to be alone,
His room no longer populous with spies
Bending above the pillow where he lies
To sow his dreams with fear that all is done,
That there’s no more reprieve, no leaf to tear
And find another January there.

So we are safe again. Goodnight, brave friends.
So may beginnings always follow ends.
Though time is treasonable, may we stand
Gathered each year, a stubborn-hearted band
Whose gaiety rises like a litany
Under the dying ornamental tree.

I posted this poem because I have two sisters and love them dearly, even though it really has nothing to do with them.

Sisters
By Adrienne Rich

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 knitting 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.

Current Tea: Diva blend (Ceylon black tea with hints of hazelnut and chocolate)

I filched a book of Adrienne Rich’s poetry from my sister’s bookcase in NJ, so here’s a selection. I think this one goes along with the resurgence of my space obsession, as it alludes to how small we really are.

Moth Hour
By Adrienne Rich

Space mildews at our touch.
The leaves of the poplar, slowly moving—
aren’t they moth-white, there in the moonbeams?
A million insects die every twilight,
no one even finds their corpses.
Death, slowly moving among the bleached clouds,
knows us better than we know ourselves.
I am gliding backward away from those who knew me
as the moon grows thinner and finally shuts its lantern.
I can be replaced a thousand times,
a box containing death.
When you put out your hand to touch me
you are already reaching toward an empty space.

This has been in my file forever since I was waiting until August 8th to post it.

8/8/68: I
By Adrienne Rich

From here on, all of us will be living
like Galileo turning his first tube at the stars.

Obey the little laws and break the great ones
is the preamble to their constitution.

Even to hope is to leap into the unknown,
under the mocking eyes of the way things are.

There’s a war on earth, and in the skull, and in the glassy spaces,
between the existing and the non-existing.

I need to live each day through, have them and know them all,
though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.

Definitely time for another one from Adrienne Rich.

The Ultimate Act
By Adrienne Rich

What if the world’s corruption nears,
The consequence they dare not name?
We shall but realize our fears
And having tasted them go on,
Neither from hope of grace nor fame,
Delivered from remorse and shame,
And do the things left to be done
For no sake other than their own.
The quarry shall be stalked and won,
The bed invaded, and the game
Played till the roof comes tumbling down
And win or lose are all the same.
Action at such a pitch shall flame
Only beneath a final sun.

The entire campus seems consumed by construction since it’s summer (fewer students), so I thought I’d post this one.

The Roofwalker
FOR DENISE LEVERTOV.
By Adrienne Rich

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.

Current Tea: peaches & ginger (full-leaf Ceylon with large pieces of peaches and ginger)

Adrienne Rich is just awesome!

Orion
By Adrienne Rich

Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you’re young

my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won’t give over
though it weighs you down as you stride

and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it;
as I throw back my head to take you in
and old transfusion happens again:
divine astronomy is nothing to it.

Indoors I bruise and blunder
break faith, leave ill enough
alone, a dead child born in the dark.
Night cracks up over the chimney,
pieces of time, frozen geodes
come showering down in the grate.

A man reaches behind my eyes
and finds them empty
a woman’s head turns away
from my head in the mirror
children are dying my death
and eating crumbs of my life.

Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,
my speechless pirate!
You take it all for granted
and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye
shooting its cold and egotistical spear
where it can do least damage.
Breath deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.

My sisters and I always picked Queen Anne’s lace and smeared the red dye in the middle all over our hands. I’m sure we didn’t think of it in this context, though!

The Knot
By Adrienne Rich

In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood.
For years I never saw it,

years of metallic vision,
spears glancing off a bright eyeball,

suns off a Swiss lake.
A foaming meadow; the Milky Way;

and there, all along, the tiny dark-red spider
sitting in the whiteness of the bridal web,

waiting to plunge his crimson knifepoint
into the white apparencies.

Little wonder the eye, healing sees
for a long time through a mist of blood.

I have never once chopped an onion without ending up with tears streaming down my cheeks and my eyes burning as if they were on fire. It’s such a shame that so many dishes taste better with onions or I’d avoid them like the plague!

Peeling Onions
By Adrienne Rich

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 though, 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.

Seriously, Adrienne Rich is amazing.

The Tree
By Adrienne Rich

Long ago I found a seed,
And kept it in a glass of water,
And half forgot my dim intent
Until I saw it start to reach
For life with one blind, fragile root.
And then I pressed it into earth
And saw its tendrils seek the air,
So slowly that I hardly knew
Of any change till it had grown
A stalk, a leaf; and seemed to be
No more a thing in need of me,
But living by some sapience
I had not given, could not withdraw.
So it grew on, and days went by,
And seasons with their common gifts,
Till at the leafage of the year
I felt the sun cut off from me
By something thick outside my room—
Not yet a tree grown to the full,
Yet so endowed with need and will
It took the warmth and left me cold.
And first I climbed with hook and shears
To prune the boughs that darkened me,
But the tree was stubborner than I,
And where I clipped it grew again,
Brutal in purpose as a weed.
Nor did it give of fruit or flower,
Though seasons brought their common gifts,
And years went by. It only grew
Darker and denser to my view,
Taking whatever I would yield—
The homage of a troubled mind—
Requiring nothing, yet accepting
My willingness to guard its life
By the endurance of my own.
It gives me nothing; yet I see
Sometimes in dreams my enemy
Hanged by the hair upon that tree.

I think it’s about time for another one from Adrienne Rich.

Versailles
PETIT TRIANON
By Adrienne Rich

Merely the landscape of a vanished whim,
An artifice that lasts beyond the wish:
The grotto by the pond, the gulping fish
That round and round pretended islands to swim,
The creamery abandoned to its doves,
The empty shrine the guidebooks say is love’s.

What wind can bleaken this, what weather chasten
Those balustrades of stone, that sky stone-pale?
A fountain triton idly soaks his tail
In the last puddle of a drying basin;
A leisure that no human will can hasten
Drips from the hollow of his lifted shell.

When we were younger gardens were for games,
But now across the sungilt lawn of kings
We drift, consulting catalogues for names
Of postured gods: the cry of closing rings
For us and for the couples in the wood
And all good children who are all too good.

O children, next year, children, you will play
With only half your hearts; be wild today.
And lovers, take on long and fast embrace
Before the sun that tarnished queens goes down,
And evening finds you in a restless town
Where each has back his old restricted face.

I am utterly blown away by the imagery in this poem. The descriptions are so vivid I feel like I am there.

The Knight
By Adrienne Rich

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 the 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 till hidden
under the great breastplate?

I think it’s time to hear from Adrienne Rich again…

The Diamond Cutters
By Adrienne Rich

However legendary,
The stone is still a stone,
Though it had once resisted
The weight of Africa,
The hammer-blows of time
That wear to bits of rubble
The mountain and the pebble—
But not this coldest one.

Now, you intelligence
So late dredged up from the dark
Upon whose smoky walls
Bison took fumbling form
Or flint was edged on flint—
Now, careful arriviste,
Delineate at will
Incisions in the ice.

Be serious, because
The stone may have contempt
For too-familiar hands,
And because all you do
Loses or gains by this:
Respect the adversary,
Meet it with tools refined,
And thereby set your price.

Be hard of heart, because
The stone must leave your hand.
Although you liberate
Pure and expensive fires
Fit to enamor Shebas,
Keep your desire apart.
Love only what you do,
And not what you have done.

Be proud, when you have set
The final spoke of flame
In that prismatic wheel,
And nothing’s left this day
Except to see the sun
Shine on the false and the true,
And know that Africa
Will yield you more to do.

How about another by Adrienne Rich. This is most depressing, but very powerful.

Why Else But To Forestall This Hour
By Adrienne Rich

Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed
Out of the noonday sun, kept from the rain,
Swam only in familiar depths, and played
No hand where caution signaled to refrain?

For fourteen friends I walked behind the bier;
A score of cousins wilted in my sight.
I heard the steeples clang for each new year,
Then drew my shutters close against the night.

Bankruptcy fell on others like a dew;
Spendthrifts of life, they all succumbed and fled.
I did not chide them with the things I knew:
Smiling, I passed the almshouse of the dead.

I am the man who has outmisered death,
In pains and cunning laid my seasons by.
Now I must toil to win each hour and breath;
I am too full of years to reason why.

How about another selection from Adrienne Rich?

In the North
By Adrienne Rich

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.

Adrienne Rich is such a powerful writer!

Boundary
By Adrienne Rich

What has happened here will do
To bite the living world in two,
Half for me and half for you.
Here at last I fix a line
Severing the world’s design
Too small to hold both yours and mine.
There’s enormity in a hair
Enough to lead men not to share
Narrow confines of a sphere
But put an ocean or a fence
Between two opposite intents.
A hair would span the difference.

The book of Adrienne Rich poems I got from the library is still sitting here by my computer, unread. Flipping through it, I came across this poem, so here you go.

From a Chapter on Literature
By Adrienne Rich

After the sunlight and the fiery vision
Leading us to a place of running water,
We came into a place by water altered.
Dew ribboned from those trees, the grasses wept
And drowned in their own weeping; vacant mist
Crawled like a snail across the land, and left
A snail’s moist trace; and everything there thriving
Stared through an aqueous half-light, without mirth
And bred by languid cycles, without ardor.

There passion mildewed and corrupted slowly,
Till, feeding hourly on its own corruption,
It had forgotten fire and aspiration,
Becoming sodden with appetite alone.
There in the green-grey thickness of the air
Lived and begat cold spores of intellect,
Till giant mosses of a rimelike aspect
Hung heavily from the boughs to testify
Against all simple sensualities,
Turning them by a touch gross and discolored,
Swelling the warm taut flesh to bloated symbol
By unrelenting watery permeations.

So from promethean hopes we came this far,
This far from lands of sun and racing blood.
Behind us lay the blazing apple tree,
Behind us too the vulture and the rock—
The tragic labor and the heroic doom—
For without passion the rock also crumbles
And the wet twilight scares the bird away.

I got a book of Adrienne Rich’s poetry from the library yesterday. Here’s a selection.

Rural Reflections
By Adrienne Rich

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 not 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.

Here’s another Adrienne Rich poem, recommended by Jen. By the way, since the fam is in town, I’m taking some time off. I probably won’t post another poem until Wednesday. (I can’t wait to be back in Austin with constant internet access!)

Storm Warnings
By Adrienne Rich

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of gray unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

I’ve never gone scuba diving, but I love this poem. P.S. I’m leaving for NM tomorrow, where I will no longer have unlimited computer access. I’ll try to keep up the poem of the day, but it’s likely I’ll miss days here and there.

Diving into the Wreck
By Adrienne Rich

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 is 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 away 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.

This one got me thinking…

For the Dead
By Adrienne Rich

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 left-over
energy, the way water goes 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 long after midnight