Adrienne Rich - An Atlas of the Difficult World

BY ADRIENNE RICH Midnight Salvage: Poems 19951998 Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 19911995 What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics Collected Early Poems 19501970 An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 19881991 Times Power: Poems 19851988 Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 19791986 Your Native Land, Your Life The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 19501984 Sources A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 19661978 The Dream of a Common Language Twenty-one Love Poems Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution Poems: Selected and New, 19501974 Diving into the Wreck The Will to Change Leaflets Necessities of Life Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law The Diamond Cutters A Change of World Graceful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote from the following: George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam Books, 1970). These poems were originally published in the following journals and magazines: American Poetry ReviewAn Atlas of the Difficult World, I, II, IV, V, VI. Bastard ReviewThat Mouth and Olivia. Beloit Poetry Journal (Fortieth Anniversary Issue)Marghanita. Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our FriendsAn Atlas of the Difficult World, XI, XIII; Eastern War Time. Frontiers: A Journal of Womens StudiesAn Atlas of the Difficult World, X, XII; 1948: Jews. Ms.She. PoetryFinal Notations, For a Friend in Travail, Two Arts. PoetryFinal Notations, For a Friend in Travail, Two Arts.

Copyright 1991 by Adrienne Rich All rights reserved. Book design by Antonina Krass The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Rich, Adrienne Cecile. An atlas of the difficult world: poems, 19881991 / Adrienne Rich. p. cm. Title. Title.

PS3535.I233A84 1991 811.54dc20 91-12900 ISBN: 978-0-393-30831-0 ISBN: 978-0-393-34574-2 (e-book) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT
www.wwnorton.com a womans voice, a mans voice or voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast past eucalyptus, cypress, agribusiness empires THE SALAD BOWL OF THE WORLD, gurr of small planes dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist, Malathion in the throat, communion, the hospital at the edge of the fields, prematures slipping from unsafe wombs, the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching planes dusting rows of pickers. Elsewhere declarations are made: at the sink rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from market one says: On the pond this evening is a light finer than my mothers handkerchief received from her mother, hemmed and initialled by the nuns in Belgium.

One says: I can lie for hours reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard. Id rather lie awake and read. One writes: Mosquitoes pour through the cracks in this cabins walls, the road in winter is often impassable, I live here so I dont have to go out and act, Im trying to hold onto my life, it feels like nothing. One says: I never knew from one day to the next where it was coming from: I had to make my life happen from day to day. Every day an emergency.

Now I have a house, a job from year to year. What does that make me? In the writing workshop a young mans tears wet the frugal beard hes grown to go with his poems hoping they have redemption stored in their lines, maybe will get him home free. In the classroom eight-year-old faces are grey. The teacher knows which children have not broken fast that day, remembers the Black Panthers spooning cereal. I dont want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake, tore up her writing, threw the kerosene lantern into her face waiting like an unbearable mirror of his own. I dont want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck and backed it into her.

I dont want to think how her guesses betrayed herthat he meant well, that she was really the stronger and ought not to leave him to his own apparent devastation. I dont want to know wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials and so are the slow lift of the moons belly over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in another season, light and music still pouring over our fissured, cracked terrain. Within two miles of the Pacific rounding this long bay, sheening the light for miles inland, floating its fog through redwood rifts and over strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with ever-changing words, always the same language this is where I live now. If you had known me once, youd still know me now though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me. But it would not surprise you to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always I fix on the land.

I am stuck to earth. What I love here is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks small canyons running through pitched hillsides liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading to the wrecked homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle on their blond hills. I drive inland over roads closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons roads that crawl down into darkness and wind into light where trucks have crashed and riders of horses tangled to death with lowstruck boughs. These are not the roads you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching for life and death, is the same. here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin we dare not taste its water This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms This is the breadbasket of foreclosed farms This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy This is the cemetery of the poor who died for democracy This is a battlefield from a nineteenth-century war the shrine is famous This is the sea-town of myth and story when the fishing fleets went bankrupt here is where the jobs were on the pier processing frozen fishsticks hourly wages and no shares These are other battlefields Centralia Detroit here are the forests primeval the copper the silver lodes These are the suburbs of acquiescence silence rising fumelike from the streets This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires flare up through air inversions whose bridges are crumbling whose children are drifting blind alleys pent between coiled rolls of razor wire I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural then yes let it be these are small distinctions where do we see it from is the question Ben Franklin, Barton, twenty-three years ago, one chipped now they hold half-burnt darkred candles, and in between a spider is working, the third point of her filamental passage a wicker basket-handle.

All afternoon Ive sat at this table in Vermont, reading, writing, cutting an apple in slivers and eating them, but mostly gazing down through the windows at the long scribble of lake due south where the wind and weather come from. There are bottles set in the windows that children dug up in summer woods or bought for nickels and dimes in dark shops that are no more, gold-brown, foam-green or cobalt glass, blue that gave way to the cobalt bomb. The woods are still on the hill behind the difficult unknowable incommensurable barn. The winds been working itself up in low gusts gnashing the leaves left chattering on branches or drifting over still-green grass; but its been a warm wind. An autumn without a killing frost so far, still warm feels like a time of self-deception, a memory of pushing limits in youth, that intricate losing game of innocence long overdue.