Rich - Later poems: selected and new, 1971-2012

Later Poems:
Selected and New 1971 2012 ADRIENNE RICH Contents
These selections were chosen by Adrienne Rich before her death.
The volume was assembled by her editor, and in creating the collection some reformatting of pages was necessary. Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 20072010 A Human Eye: Essays on Art and Society, 19972008 Poetry & Commitment: An Essay Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 20042006 The School Among the Ruins: Poems 20002004 What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 19502000 Fox: Poems 19982000 Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations Midnight Salvage: Poems 19951998 Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 19911995 Collected Early Poems 19501970 An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 19881991 Times Power: Poems 19851988 Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 19791985 Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems Sources A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 19781981 On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 19661978 The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 19741977 Twenty-one Love Poems Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution Poems: Selected and New, 19501974 Diving into the Wreck: Poems 19711972 The Will to Change: Poems 19681970 Leaflets: Poems 19651968 Necessities of Life Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 19541962 The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems A Change of World

Out in this desert we are testing bombs, thats why we came here. Sometimes I feel an underground river forcing its way between deformed cliffs an acute angle of understanding moving itself like a locus of the sun into this condemned scenery. What weve had to give up to get here whole LP collections, films we starred in playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies, the language of love-letters, of suicide notes, afternoons on the riverbank pretending to be children Coming out to this desert we meant to change the face of driving among dull green succulents walking at noon in the ghost town surrounded by a silence that sounds like the silence of the place except that it came with us and is familiar and everything we were saying until now was an effort to blot it out Coming out here we are up against it Out here I feel more helpless with you than without you You mention the danger and list the equipment we talk of people caring for each other in emergencieslaceration, thirst but you look at me like an emergency Your dry heat feels like power your eyes are stars of a different magnitude they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT when you get up and pace the floor talking of the danger as if it were not ourselves as if we were testing anything else. 1971 (for E.

	Trying to tell you how
the anatomy of the park
through stained panes, the way
guerrillas are advancing
through minefields, the trash
burning endlessly in the dump
to return to heaven like a stain
everything outside our skins is an image
of this affliction:
stones on my table, carried by hand
from scenes I trusted
souvenirs of what I once described
as happiness
everything outside my skin
speaks of the fault that sends me limping
even the scars of my decisions
even the sunblaze in the mica-vein
even you, fellow-creature, sister,
sitting across from me, dark with love,
working like me to pick apart
working with me to remake
this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness,
this womans garment, trying to save the skein.
	The fact of being separate
enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture
a chest of seventeenth-century wood
from somewhere in the North.
It has a huge lock shaped like a womans head
but the key has not been found.
In the compartments are other keys
to lost doors, an eye of glass.
Slowly you begin to add
things of your own.
You come and go reflected in its panels.
You give up keeping track of anniversaries,
you begin to write in your diaries
more honestly than ever.
	The lovely landscape of southern Ohio
betrayed by strip mining, the
thick gold band on the adulterers finger
the blurred programs of the offshore pirate station
are causes for hesitation.
Here in the matrix of need and anger, the
disproof of what we thought possible
failures of medication
doubts of anothers existence
tell it over and over, the words
get thick with unmeaning
yet never have we been closer to the truth
of the lies we were living, listen to me:
the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed
flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing
the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.

1971 To live, to lie awake under scarred plaster while ice is forming over the earth at an hour when nothing can be done to further any decision to know the composing of the thread inside the spiders body first atoms of the web visible tomorrow to feel the fiery future of every matchstick in the kitchen Nothing can be done but by inches.

	Trying to tell you how
the anatomy of the park
through stained panes, the way
guerrillas are advancing
through minefields, the trash
burning endlessly in the dump
to return to heaven like a stain
everything outside our skins is an image
of this affliction:
stones on my table, carried by hand
from scenes I trusted
souvenirs of what I once described
as happiness
everything outside my skin
speaks of the fault that sends me limping
even the scars of my decisions
even the sunblaze in the mica-vein
even you, fellow-creature, sister,
sitting across from me, dark with love,
working like me to pick apart
working with me to remake
this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness,
this womans garment, trying to save the skein.
	The fact of being separate
enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture
a chest of seventeenth-century wood
from somewhere in the North.
It has a huge lock shaped like a womans head
but the key has not been found.
In the compartments are other keys
to lost doors, an eye of glass.
Slowly you begin to add
things of your own.
You come and go reflected in its panels.
You give up keeping track of anniversaries,
you begin to write in your diaries

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