Poems by Adrienne RichMy swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
We can look into the stove tonight
as into a mirror, yes,
the serrated log, the yellow-blue gaseous core
1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each
speaker of the so-called common language feels
First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
It will not be simple, it will not take long
It will take little time, it will take all your thought
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The clouds and the stars didn't wage this war
the brooks gave no information
The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days
I don?t know who we thought we were
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
The world's
not wanton
only wild and wavering
I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by
Talking of poetry, hauling the books
arm-full to the table where the heads
bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety
~ Webster
A wild patience has taken me this far
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards,
is carried piecemeal through the snow;
Headboard and footboard now, the bed
My mouth hovers across your breasts
in the short grey winter afternoon
in this bed we are delicate
Stripped
you're beginning to float free
up through the smoke of brushfires
and incinerators
Far back when I went zig-zagging
through tamarack pastures
you were my genius, you
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
Our whole life a translation
the permissible fibs
and now a knot of lies
eating at itself to get undone
Thinking of Caroline Herschel, 1750-1848, Astronomer, Sister of William; and Others
A woman in the shape of a monster
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always risk
This is the grass your feet are planted on.
You paint it orange or you sing it green,
But you have never found
A life hauls itself uphill
through hoar-mist steaming
the sun's tongue licking
leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid
1
You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I'm fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
1.
Sex, as they harshly call it,
I fell into this morning
at ten o'clock, a drizzling hour
of traffic and wet newspapers.
Something spreading underground won't speak to us
under skin won't declare itself
not all life-forms want dialogue with the
My three sisters are sitting
on rocks of black obsidian.
For the first time, in this light, I can see who they are.
