Rich - Times power: poems 1985-88

PS3535.I233T5 1989 811'.54dc19 88-29059 ISBN 0-393-02677-9 ISBN 0-393-30575-9 PBK. ISBN 978-0-393-30575-3 ISBN 978-0-393-34813-2 (e-book) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

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www.wwnorton.com ADRIENNE RICH (1929-2012) was the singular voice of her generation and one of our most important American poets. The author of more than thirty books, she brought discussions of gender, race, and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. She was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the National Book Award, the Bollinger Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Your windfall at fifteen your Steinway grand paid for by fire insurance came to me as birthright a black cave with teeth of ebony and ivory twanging and thundering over the head of the crawling child until that child was set on the big book on the chair to face the keyboard world of black and white already knowing the world was black and white The childs hands smaller than a sand-dollar set on the keys wired to their mysteries the childs wits facing the ruled and ruling staves For years we battled over music lessons mine, taught by you Nor did I wonder what that keyboard meant to you the hours of solitude the practising your life of prize-recitals lifted hopes Piattis nephew praising you at sixteen scholarships to the North Or what it was to teach boarding-school girls what wont be used shelving ambition beating time to On the Ice at Sweet Briar or The Sunken Cathedral for a child counting the minutes and the scales to freedom Freedom: what could that mean, for you or me? Summers of 36, 37, Europe untuned what I remember isnt lessons not Bach or Brahms or Mozart but the rented upright in the summer rental One Hundred Best-Loved Songs on the piano rack And so you played, evenings and so we sang Steal Away and Swanee River, Swing Low, and most of all Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord How we sang out the chorus how I loved the watchfires of the hundred circling campsand truth is marching on and let us die to make men free Piano lessons The mother and the daughter Their doomed exhaustion their common mystery worked out in finger-exercises Czerny, Hanon The yellow Schirmer albums quarter-rests double-holds glyphs of an astronomy the mother cannot teach the daughter because this is not the story of a mother teaching magic to her daughter Side by side I see us locked My wrists your voice are tightened Passion lives in old songs in the kitchen where another woman cooks teaches and sings He shall feed his flock like a shepherd and in the booklined room where the Jewish father reads and smokes and teaches Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Song of Songs The daughter struggles with the strange notations dark chart of musics ocean flowers and flags but would rather learn by ear and heart The mother says she must learn to read by sight not ear and heart Daughter who fought her mothers lessons even today a scrip of music balks me I feel illiterate in this your mother-tongue Had it been Greek or Slovak no more could your native alphabet have baffled your daughter whom you taught for years held by a tether over the ivory and ebony teeth of the Steinway It is the three hundredth anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach My earliest life woke to his English Suites under your fingers I understand a language I cant read Music you played streams on the car radio in the freeway night You kept your passions deep You have them still I ask you, both of us Did you think mine was a virtuosos hand? Did I see power in yours? What was worth fighting for? What did you want? What did I want from you? 19851988 Face flashing free child-arms lifting the collie pup torn paper on the path Central Park April 72 behind you minimal those benches and that shade that brilliant light in which you laughed longhaired and Im the keeper of this little piece of paper this little piece of truth I wanted this from you laughter a child turning into a boy at ease in the spring light with friends I wanted this for you I could mutter Give backthat day give me againthat child with the chanceof making it all right I could yell Give back that lighton the dogs teeth the childs hair but no rough drafts are granted Do you think I dont remember? did you think I was all-powerful unimpaired unappalled ? yes you needed that from me I wanted this from you 1985 Tell me, bristler, where do you get such hair so quick a flare so strong a tongue Green eyes fierce curls there and here a mole a girls dimples a warriors mind dark blood under gold skin testing, testing the world the word and so to write for you a pretty sonnet would be untrue to your mud-river flashing over rocks your delicate coffee-bushes and more I cannot know and some I labor with and I mean to stay true even in poems, to you But theres something more Beauty, when you were young we both thought we were young now thats all done were serious now about death we talk to her daily, as to a neighbor were learning to be true with her she has the keys to this house if she must she can sleep over 1986 Someday if someday comes we will agree that trust is not about safety that keeping faith is not about deciding to clip our fingernails exactly to the same length or wearing a uniform that boasts our unanimity Someday if someday comes well know the difference between liberal laissez-faire pluralism and the way you cut your hair and the way I clench my hand against my cheekbone both being possible gestures of defiance Someday if theres a someday we will bring food, youll say I cant eat what youve brought Ill say Have some in the name of our trying to be friends, youll say What about you? well taste strange meat and well admit weve tasted stranger Someday if someday ever comes well go back and reread those poems and manifestos that so enraged us in each others hand Ill say, But damn, you wrote it so I couldnt write it off Youll say I read you always, even when I hated you 1986 Talking of poetry, hauling the books arm-full to the table where the heads bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud, talking of consonants, elision, caught in the how, oblivious of why: I look in your face, Jude, neither frowning nor nodding, opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table: a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking