Rich - The Will to Change

By Adrienne Rich TIMES POWER BLOOD, BREAD, AND POETRY: Selected Prose 19791985 OF WOMAN BORN: Tenth Anniversary Edition 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 TWENY-ONE LOVE POEMS OF WOMAN BORN: Motherhood as Experience and Institution POEMS: SELECTED AND NEW, 19501974 DIVING INTO THE WRECK THE WILL TO CHANCE LEAFLETS NECESSITIES OF LIFE SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW THE DIAMOND CUTTERS A CHANGE OF WORLD Some of these poems have appeared in the following periodicals: November 1968, Study of History, and I Dream Im the Death of Orpheus in Colloquy; Planetarium in Aphra and Inside Outer Space; The Burning of Paper Instead of Children in Caterpillar; Pierrot Le Fou in Field; Letters: March 1969 in Harpers Magazine; Pieces in Salmagundi; Our Whole Life in The New Republic; The Stelae in New York Quarterly; The Photograph of the Unmade Bed in First Issue, No. 4. 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 Copyright 1971 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 78-146842 ISBN 978-0-393-04361-7 ISBN 978-0-393-34816-3 (e-book) Stripped youre beginning to float free up through the smoke of brushfires and incinerators the unleafed branches wont hold you nor the radar aerials Youre what the autumn knew would happen after the last collapse of primary color once the last absolutes were torn to pieces you could begin How you broke open, what sheathed you until this moment I know nothing about it my ignorance of you amazes me now that I watch you starting to give yourself away to the wind 1968 Out there.

The mind of the river as it might be you. Lights blotted by unseen hulls repetitive, shapes passing dull foam crusting the margin barges sunk below the water-line with silence. The scow, drudging on. Lying in the dark, to think of you and your harsh traffic gulls pecking your rubbish natural historians mourning your lost purity pleasure cruisers witlessly careening you but this after all is the narrows and after all we have never entirely known what was done to you upstream what powers trepanned which of your channels diverted what rockface leaned to stare in your upturned defenseless face. 1968 (Thinking of CarolineHerschel, 17501848,astronomer, sister ofWilliam; and others A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind An eye, virile, precise and, absolutely certain from the mad webs of Uranisborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last Let me not seem to have lived in vain What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslateable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me And has taken I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind. 1968 The Burning of Paper
Instead of Children I was in danger ofverbalizing my moralimpulses out ofexistence.Fr.

Daniel Berrigan,on trial in Baltimore. 1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics text-book in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. The burning of a book, he says, arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book. Back there: the library, walled with green Britannicas Looking again in Drers Complete Works for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman the crocodiles in Herodotus the Book of the Dead the Trial of Jeanne dArc, so blue I think, It is her color and they take the book away because I dream of her too often love and fear in a house knowledge of the oppressor I know it hurts to burn 2.

To imagine a time of silence or few words a time of chemistry and music the hollows above your buttocks traced by my hand or, hair is like flesh, you said an age of long silence relief from this tongue the slab of limestone or reinforced concrete fanatics and traders dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred that breathed once in signals of smoke sweep of the wind knowledge of the oppressor this is the oppressors language yet I need it to talk to you 3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes. (the fracture of order the repair of speech to overcome this suffering) 4. We lie under the sheet after making love, speaking of loneliness relieved in a book relived in a book so on that page the clot and fissure of it appears words of a man in pain a naked word entering the clot a hand grasping through bars: deliverance What happens between us has happened for centuries we know it from literature still it happens sexual jealousy outflung hand beating bed dryness of mouth after panting there are books that describe all this and they are useless You walk into the woods behind a house there in that country you find a temple built eighteen hundred years ago you enter without knowing what it is you enter so it is with us no one knows what may happen though the books tell everything burn the texts said Artaud 5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today.

How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Miltons. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French.

Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn.

There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressors language. 1968 I Dream
Im the Death of Orpheus I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade. I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see. I am a woman in the prime of life driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce through a landscape of twilight and thorns.