Rich - Snapshots of a daughter-in-law poems ; 1954 - 1962

By the same author NECESSITIES OF LIFE THE DIAMOND CUTTERS A CHANGE OF WORLD Some of the poems in this book first appeared in The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Critical Quarterly (Great Britain), Harpers Magazine, The Nation, Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poems in Folio, Portfolio and Art News Annual, New Poets of England and America No. 2, and Penguin Anthology of Modem American Poetry. At Majority and From Morning-Glory to Petersburg appeared originally in The New Yorker. Readings of History was presented as the 1960 Phi Beta Kappa poem at the College of William and Mary. Copyright 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1967, by Adrienne Rich Conrad. Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 67-24016 All Rights Reserved Published simultaneously in Canada by George J. for C. for C.

When you are old and beautiful, And things most difficult are done, There will be few who can recall Your face that I see ravaged now By youth and its oppressive work. Your look will hold their wondering looks Grave as Cordelias at the last, Neither with rancor at the past Nor to upbraid the coming time. For you will be at peace with time. But now, a daily warfare takes Its toll of tenderness in you, And you must live like captains who Wait out the hour before the charge Fearful, and yet impatient too. Yet someday this will have an end, All choices made or choice resigned, And in your face the literal eye Trace little of your history, Nor ever piece the tale entire Of villages that had to burn And playgrounds of the will destroyed Before you could be safe from time And gather in your brow and air The stillness of antiquity. 1954 (The World Book, 1928) Organized knowledge in story and picture confronts through dusty glass an eye grown dubious.

I can recall when knowledge still was pure, not contradictory, pleasurable as cutting out a paper doll. You opened up a book and there it was: everything just as promised, from Kurdistan to Mormons, Gum Arabic to Kumquat, neither more nor less. Facts could be kept separate by a convention; that was what made childhood possible. Now knowledge finds me out; in all its risible untidiness it traces me to each address, dragging in things I never thought about. I dont invite what facts can be held at arms length; a family of jeering irresponsibles always comes along gypsy-style and there you have them all forever on your hands. It never pays.

If I could still extrapolate the morning-glory on the gate from Petersburg in historybut its too late. 1954 This is the grass your feet are planted on. You paint it orange or you sing it green, But you have never found A way to make the grass mean what you mean. A cloud can be whatever you intend: Ostrich or leaning tower or staring eye. But you have never found A cloud sufficient to express the sky. Get out there with your splendid expertise; Raymond who cuts the meadow does no less.

Inhuman nature says: Inhuman patience is the true success. Human impatience trips you as you run; Stand still and you must lie. It is the grass that cuts the mower down; It is the cloud that swallows up the sky. 1956 A knight rides into the noon, and his helmet points to the sun, and a thousand splintered suns are the gaiety of his mail. The soles of his feet glitter and his palms flash in reply, and under his crackling banner he rides like a ship in sail. A knight rides into the noon, and only his eye is living, a lump of bitter jelly set in a metal mask, betraying rags and tatters that cling to the flesh beneath and wear his nerves to ribbons under the radiant casque.

Who will unhorse this rider and free him from between the walls of iron, the emblems crushing his chest with their weight? Will they defeat him gently, or leave him hurled on the green, his rags and wounds still hidden under the great breastplate? 1957A man thinks of the woman he once loved:first, after her wedding, and then nearly adecade later. I I kissed you, bride and lost, and went home from that bourgeois sacrament, your cheek still tasting cold upon my lips that gave you benison with all the swagger that they knew as losers somehow learn to do. Your wedding made my eyes ache; soon the world would be worse off for one more golden apple dropped to ground without the least protesting sound, and you would windfall lie, and we forget your shimmer on the tree. Beauty is always wasted: if not Mignons song sung to the deaf, at all events to the unmoved. A face like yours cannot be loved long or seriously enough. Almost, we seem to hold it off. II Well, you are tougher than I thought.

Now when the wash with ice hangs taut this morning of St. Valentine, I see you strip the squeaking line, your body weighed against the load, and all my groans can do no good. Because you still are beautiful, though squared and stiffened by the pull of what nine windy years have done. You have three daughters, lost a son. I see all your intelligence flung into that unwearied stance. My envy is of no avail.

I turn my head and wish him well who chafed your beauty into use and lives forever in a house lit by the friction of your mind. You stagger in against the wind. 1958 What do you look for down there in the cracks of the pavement? Or up there between the pineapple and the acanthus leaf in that uninspired ornament? Odysseus wading half-naked out of the shrubbery like a god, dead serious among those at play, could hardly be more out of it. In school we striped your back with chalk, you all oblivious, your eyes harnessed by a transparent strand reaching the other side of things, or down like a wellchain to the center of earth. Now with those same eyes you pull the pavements up like old linoleum, arches of triumph start to liquefy minutes after you slowly turn away. 1958 I have to weep when I see it, the grown boy fretting for a father dawdling among the isles, and the seascape hollowed out by that boys edged gaze to receive one speck, one only, for years and years withheld.

And that speck, that curious man, has kept from home till home would seem the forbidden place, till blood and the tears of an old woman must run down to satisfy the genius of place. Even then, what can they do together, father and son? the driftwood stranger and the rooted boy whose eyes will have nothing then to ask the sea. But all the time and everywhere lies in ambush for the distracted eyeball light: light on the ship racked up in port, the chimney-stones, the scar whiter than smoke, than her flanks, her hair, that true but aging bride. 1958 Wear the weight of equinoctial evening, light like melons bruised on all the porches. Feel the houses tenderly appraise you, hold you in the watchfulness of mothers. Once the nighttime was a milky river washing past the swimmers in the sunset, rinsing over sleepers of the morning.

Soon the night will be an eyeless quarry where the shrunken daylight and its rebels, loosened, dive like stones in perfect silence, names and voices drown without reflection. Then the houses draw you. Then they have you. 1958 The months eye blurs. The winters lungs are cracked. Along bloated gutters race, shredded, your injured legions, the waste of our remorseless search.

Your old, unuttered names are holes worn in our skins through which we feel from time to time abrasive wind. Those who are loved live poorly and in danger. We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever. A day returns, a certain weather splatters the panes, and we once more stare in the eye of our first failure. 1958 You, once a belle in Shreveport, with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud, still have your dresses copied from that time, and play a Chopin prelude called by Cortot: