Tonight
No Poetry
Will Serve
ALSO BY ADRIENNE RICH
A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997–2008
Poetry & Commitment: An Essay
The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950–2000
Fox: Poems 1998–2000
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998
Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995
Collected Early Poems 1950–1970
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991
Time's Power: Poems 1985–1988
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985
Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems
Sources
A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977
Twenty-one Love Poems
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974
Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972
The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970
Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968
Necessities of Life
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954–1962
The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems
A Change of World
Tonight
No Poetry
Will Serve
POEMS 2007–2010
ADRIENNE RICH
SERVE (v.t.):
to work for, be a servant to;
to give obedience and reverent honor to;
to fight for; do military or naval service for;
to go through or spend (a term of imprisonment);
to meet the needs of or satisfy the requirements of, be used by;
to deliver (a legal document) as a summons
—Webster's New World Dictionary
of the American Language (1964)
Contents
I
Waiting for Rain, for Music
Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time
Benjamin Revisited
Innocence
Domain
Fracture
Turbulence
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
II
Scenes of Negotiation
III
From Sickbed Shores
IV
Axel Avákar
Axel Avákar
Axel: backstory
Axel, in thunder
I was there, Axel
Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house
V
Ballade of the Poverties
Emergency Clinic
Confrontations
Circum/Stances
Winterface
Quarto
Don't Flinch
Black Locket
Generosity
VI
You, Again
Powers of Recuperation
Notes on the Poems
Acknowledgments
I
Waiting for Rain, for Music
Burn me some music Send my roots rain I'm swept
dry from inside Hard winds rack my core
A struggle at the roots of the mind Whoever said
it would go on and on like this
Straphanger swaying inside a runaway car
palming a notebook scribbled in
contraband calligraphy against the war
poetry wages against itself
Once under a shed's eaves
thunder drumming membrane of afternoon
electric scissors slitting the air
thick drops spattering few and far
we could smell it then a long way off
But where's the rain coming to soak this soil
Burn me some music There's a tune
"Neglect of Sorrow"
I've heard it hummed or strummed
my whole life long
in many a corridor
waiting for tomorrow
long after tomorrow
should've come
on many an ear it should have fallen
but the bands were playing so loud
2007
Reading the Iliad (As If) for
the First Time
Lurid, garish, gash
rended creature struggles to rise, to
run with dripping belly
Blood making everything more real
pounds in the spearthruster's arm as in
the gunman's neck the offhand
moment—Now!—before he
takes the bastards out
Splendor in black and ochre on a grecian urn
Beauty as truth
The sea as background
stricken with black long-oared ships
on shore chariots shields greaved muscled legs
horses rearing Beauty! flesh before gangrene
Mind-shifting G-ds rush back and forth Delusion
a daughter seized by the hair swung out to bewilder men
Everything here is conflictual and is called man's fate
Ugly glory: open-eyed wounds
feed enormous flies
Hoofs slicken on bloodglaze
Horses turn away their heads
weeping equine tears
Beauty?
a wall with names of the fallen
from both sides passionate objectivity
2009
Benjamin Revisited
The angel
of history is
flown
now meet the janitor
down
in the basement who
shirtless smoking
has the job of stoking
the so-called past
into the so-called present
2007
Innocence
… thought, think, I did
some terrible
thing back then
—thing that left traces
all over you
your work / how your figure
pressed into the world ?
Had you murdered
—or not—something if not
someone Had blindly—or not—
followed custom needing to be
broken Broken
—or not—with custom
needing to be kept ?
Something—a body—still
spins in air a weaving weight
a scorching
However it was done
And the folks disassembling
from under the tree
after you snapped the picture
saliva thick in your mouth
Disfigured sequel:
confederations of the progeny
cottaged along these roads
front-center colonials
shrubbery lights in blue
and silver
crèche on the judge's lawn O the dear baby
People craving in their mouths
warm milk over soft white bread
2007
Domain
i
A girl looks through a microscope her father's
showing her life
in a drop of water or
finger blood smeared onto a glass wafer
Later leaning head on hand
while the sound of scales being practiced
clambers bleakly, adamantly up the stairs
she reads her own handwriting
Neighbors don't meet on the corner here
the child whose parents aren't home is not offered a meal
the congressman's wife who wears nothing but green
tramples through unraked oak leaves yelling
to her strayed dogs Hey Rex! Hey Roy!
Husband in Washington: 1944
The girl finding her method: you want friends
you're going to have to write
letters to strangers
ii
A coffee stain splashed on a desk: her accident her
mistake her true
country: wavy brown coastline upland
silken reeds swayed by long lectures of the wind
From the shore small boats reach, depart, return
the never-leavers tie nets of dried seaweed weighted
with tumbled-down stones
instructing young fingers through difficult knots
guiding, scraping some young fingers
No sound carries far from here
Rebuked, utopian projection
she visits rarely trying to keep
interior root systems, milky
nipples of stars, airborne wings rushing over
refuge of missing parts
intact
2008
Fracture
When on that transatlantic call into the unseen
ear of a hack through whiskey film you blabbed
your misanthrope's
misremembered remnant of a story
given years back in trust
a rearview mirror
cracked /
shock of an ice-cube biting liquid
Heard the sound / didn't know yet
where it was coming from
That mirror / gave up our ghosts
This fine clear summer morning / a line from Chekhov:
it would be strange not to forgive
(I in body now alive)
All are human / give / forgive
drop the charges / let go / put away
Rage for the trusting
it would be strange not to say
Love? yes
in this lifted hand / behind
these eyes
upon you / now
2007
Turbulence
There'll be turbulence. You'll drop
your book to hold your
water bottle steady. Your
mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall
may who ne'er hung there let him
watch the movie. The plane's
supposed to shudder, shoulder on
like this. It's built to do that. You're
designed to tremble too. Else break
Higher you climb, trouble in mind
lungs labor, heights hurl vistas
Oxygen hangs ready
overhead. In the event put on
the child's mask first. Breathe normally
2007
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid
later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere
Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve
Syntax of rendition:
verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action
verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing
now diagram the sentence
2007
II
Scenes of Negotiation
Z: I hated that job but You'd have taken it too if you'd had a family
Y: Pretty filthy and dangerous though wasn't it?
Z: Those years, one bad move, you were down on your knees begging for work
Zz: If you'd had a family! Who'd you think we were, just people standing around?
Yy: Filthy and dangerous like the streets I worked before you ever met me?
Zz: Those years you never looked at any of us. Staring into your own eyelids. Like you saw a light there. Can you see me now?
Hired guards shove metal barriers through plate glass, then prod the first line of protestors in through the fanged opening. Video and cellphone cameras devouring it all. Sucked in and blurted worldwide: "Peace" Rally Turns Violent
Protestors, a mixed bunch, end up in different holding cells where they won't see each other again
Being or doing: you're taken in for either, or both. Who you were born as, what or who you chose or became. Facing moral disorder head-on, some for the first time, on behalf of others. Delusion of inalienable rights. Others who've known the score all along
Some bailed-out go back to the scene. Some go home to sleep. Others, it's months in solitary mouthing dialogues with nobody. Imagining social presence. Fending off, getting ready for the social absence called death
This isn't much more than a shed on two-by-fours over the water. Uncaulked. Someone's romantic hideaway. We've been here awhile, like it well enough. The tide retches over rocks below. Wind coming up now. We liked it better when the others were still here. They went off in different directions. Patrol boats gathered some in, we saw the lights and heard the megaphones. Tomorrow I'll take the raggedy path up to the road, walk into town, buy a stamp and mail this. Town is a mini-mart, church, oyster-bar-dance-hall, fishing access, roadside cabins. Weekenders, locals, we can blend in. They couldn't so well. We were trying to stay with the one thing most people agree on. They said there was no such one thing without everything else, you couldn't make it so simple
Have books, tapes here, and this typewriter voice telling you what I'm telling you in the language we used to share. Everyone still sends love
There are no illusions at this table, she said to me
Room up under the roof. Men and women, a resistance cell ? I thought. Reaching hungrily for trays of folded bread, rice with lentils, brown jugs of water and pale beer. Joking across the table along with alertness, a kind of close mutual attention. One or two picking on small stringed instruments taken down from a wall
I by many decades the oldest person there. However I was there
Meal finished, dishes rinsed under a tap, we climbed down a kind of stair-ladder to the floor below. There were camouflage-patterned outfits packed in cartons; each person shook out and put on a pair of pants and a shirt, still creased from the packing. They wore them like work clothes. Packed underneath were weapons
Thick silverblack hair, eyes seriously alive, hue from some ancient kiln. The rest of them are in profile; that face of hers I see full focus
One by one they went out through a dim doorway to meet whoever they'd been expecting. I write it down from memory. Couldn't find the house later yet
—No illusions at this table. Spoken from her time back into mine. I'm the dreaming ghost, guest, waitress, watcher, wanting the words to be true.
Whatever the weapons may come to mean
2009
III
From Sickbed Shores
From shores of sickness: skin of the globe stretches and
snakes
out and in room sound of the universe bearing
undulant wavelengths to an exhausted ear
(sick body in a sick country: can it get well?
what is it anyway to exist as
matter to
matter?)
All, all is remote from here: yachts carelessly veering
tanker's beak plunging into the strut of the bridge
slicked encircling waters
wired wrists jerked-back heads
gagged mouths flooded lungs
All, all remote and near
Wavelengths—
whose? mine, theirs, ours even
yours who haven't yet put in a word?
So remoteness glazes sickened skin affliction of
distance so
strangely, easily, clinging like webs spread overnight
by creatures vanished
before we caught them at work
So: to bear this state, this caul which could be hell's
airborne anaesthetic, exemption from feeling or
hell's pure and required definition:
—surrender
to un-belonging, being-for-itself-alone, runged
behind white curtains in an emergency cubicle, taking care
of its own
condition
All is matter, of course, matter-of-course You could have
taken
courses in matter all along attending instead of cutting the class
You knew the telephone had wires, you could see them
overhead
where sparrows sat and chattered together
you alongside a window somewhere phone in hand
listening to tears thickening a throat in a city somewhere else
you muttering back your faulty formulae
ear tuned to mute vibrations from an occupied zone:
an old, enraged silence still listening for your voice
Did you then holding
the phone tongue your own lips finger your naked shoulder as
if you could liquefy touch into sound through wires to lips
or shoulders lick
down an entire body in familiar mystery irregardless laws
of matter?
Hopeless imagination of signals not to be
received
From the shores of sickness you lie out on listless
waters with no boundaries floodplain without horizon
dun skies mirroring its opaque face and nothing not
a water moccasin or floating shoe or tree root to stir interest
Somewhere else being the name of whatever once said your
name
and you answered now the only where is here this dull
floodplain
this body sheathed in indifference sweat no longer letting
the fever out
but coating it in oil You could offer any soul-tricking
oarsman
whatever coin you're still palming but there's a divide
between the shores of sickness and the legendary, purifying
river of death You will have this tale to tell, you will have
to live
to tell
this tale
2008
IV
Axel Avákar
Axel Avákar
Axel: backstory
Axel, in thunder
I was there, Axel
Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house
[Axel Avákar: fictive poet, counter-muse, brother]
Axel Avákar
The I you know isn't me, you said, truthtelling liar
My roots are not my chains
And I to you: Whose hands have grown
through mine? Owl-voiced I cried then: Who?
But yours was the one, the only eye assumed
Did we turn each other into liars?
holding hands with each others' chains?
At last we unhook, dissolve, secrete into islands
—neither a tender place—
yours surf-wrung, kelp-strung
mine locked in black ice on a mute lake
I dug my firepit, built a windbreak,
spread a sheepskin, zoned my telescope lens
to the far ledge of the Milky Way
lay down to sleep out the cold
Daybreak's liquid dreambook:
lines of a long poem pouring down a page
Had I come so far, did I fend so well
only to read your name there, Axel Avákar?
Axel: backstory
Steam from a melting glacier
your profile hovering
there Axel as if we'd lain prone at fifteen
on my attic bedroom floor elbow to elbow reading
in Baltimorean August-
blotted air
Axel I'm back to you
brother of strewn books of late
hours drinking poetry scooped in both hands
Dreamt you into existence, did I, boy-
comrade who would love
everything I loved
Without my eyelash glittering piercing
sidewise in your eye
where would you have begun, Axel how
would the wheel-spoke have whirled
your mind? What word
stirred in your mouth without my
nipples' fierce erection? our
twixt-and-between
Between us yet
my part belonged to me
and when we parted
I left no part behind I knew
how to make poetry happen
Back to you Axel through the crackling heavy
salvaged telephone
Axel, in thunder
Axel, the air's beaten
like a drumhead here where it seldom thunders
dolphin
lightning
leaps
over the bay surfers flee
crouching to trucks
climbers hanging
from pitons in their night hammocks
off the granite face
wait out an unforetold storm
while somewhere in all weathers you're
crawling exposed not by choice extremist
hell-bent searching your soul
—O my terrified my obdurate
my wanderer keep the trail
I was there, Axel
Pain made her conservative.
Where the matches touched her flesh, she wears a scar.
—"The Blue Ghazals"
Pain taught her the language
root of radical
she walked on knives to gain a voice
fished the lake of lost
messages gulping up
from far below and long ago
needed both arms to haul them in
one arm was tied behind her
the other worked to get it free
it hurt itself because
work hurts I was there Axel
with her in that boat
working alongside
and my decision was
to be in no other way
a woman
Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house
1
And could it be I saw you
under a roof of glass
in trance
could it be was passing
by and would translate
too late the strained flicker
of your pupils your
inert gait the dark
garb of your reflection
in that translucent place
could be I might have
saved you still
could or would ?
2
Laid my ear to your letter trying to hear
Tongue on your words to taste you there
Couldn't read what you
had never written there
Played your message over
feeling bad
Played your message over it was all I had
To tell me what and wherefore
this is what it said:
I'm tired of you asking me why
I'm tired of words like the chatter of birds
Give me a pass, let me just get by
3
Back to back our shadows
stalk each other Axel but
not only yours and mine Thickly lies
the impasto
scrape down far enough you get
the early brushwork emblems
intimate detail
and scratched lines underneath
—a pictograph
one figure leaning forward
to speak or listen
one figure backed away
unspeakable
(If that one moved—)
but the I you knew who made
you once can't save you
my blood won't even match yours
4
"The dead" we say as if speaking
of "the people" who
gave up on making history
simply to get through
Something dense and null groan
without echo underground
and owl-voiced I cry Who
are these dead these people these
lovers who if ever did
listen no longer answer
: We :
5
Called in to the dead: why didn't you write?
What should I have asked you?
—what would have been the true
unlocking code
if all of them failed—
I've questioned the Book of Questions
studied gyres of steam
twisting from a hot cup
in a cold sunbeam
turned the cards over lifted the spider's foot
from the mangled hexagon
netted the beaked eel from the river's mouth
asked and let it go
2007–2008
V
Ballade of the Poverties
There's the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the
rusted toilet bowl
The poverty of to steal food for the first time
The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck
The poverty of sweet charity ladling
Soup for the poor who must always be there for that
There's poverty of theory poverty of swollen belly shamed
Poverty of the diploma or ballot that goes nowhere
Princes of predation let me tell you
There are poverties and there are poverties
There's the poverty of cheap luggage bursted open at
immigration
Poverty of the turned head averted eye
The poverty of bored sex of tormented sex
The poverty of the bounced check poverty of the dumpster
dive
The poverty of the pawned horn of the smashed reading
glasses
The poverty pushing the sheeted gurney the poverty
cleaning up the puke
The poverty of the pavement artist the poverty passed out on
pavement
Princes of finance you who have not lain there
There are poverties and there are poverties
There is the poverty of hand-to-mouth and door-to-door
And the poverty of stories patched up to sell there
There's the poverty of the child thumbing the Interstate
And the poverty of the bride enlisting for war
There is the poverty of stones fisted in pocket
And the poverty of the village bulldozed to rubble
There's the poverty of coming home not as you left it
And the poverty of how would you ever end it
Princes of weaponry who have not ever tasted war
There are poverties and there are poverties
There's the poverty of wages wired for the funeral you
Can't get to the poverty of bodies lying unburied
There's the poverty of labor offered silently on the curb
The poverty of the no-contact prison visit
There's the poverty of yard-sale scrapings spread
And rejected the poverty of eviction, wedding bed out on street
Prince let me tell you who will never learn through words
There are poverties and there are poverties
You who travel by private jet like a housefly
Buzzing with the other flies of plundered poverties
Princes and courtiers who will never learn through words
Here's a mirror you can look into: take it: it's yours.
for James and Arlene Scully
2009
Emergency Clinic
Caustic implacable
poem unto and contra:
I do not soothe minor
injuries I do
not offer I require
close history
of the case apprentice-
ship in past and fresh catastrophe
The skin too quickly scabbed
mutters for my debriding
For every bandaged wound
I'll scrape another open
I won't smile
while wiping
your tears
I do not give
simplehearted love and nor
allow you simply love me
if you accept regardless
this will be different
Iodine-dark
poem walking to and fro all night
un-gainly
unreconciled
unto and contra
2008
Confrontations
It's not new, this condition, just for awhile
kept deep
in the cortex of things imagined
Now the imagination comes of age
I see ourselves, full-lipped, blood-flushed
in cold air, still conflicted, still
embraced
boarding the uncharter'd bus of vanishment
backward glances over and done
afterimages
swirl and dissolve along a shoal of footprints
Simple ghouls flitter already among our leavings
fixing labels in their strange language
But
up to now we're not debris
(only to their fascinated eyes)
2009
Circum/Stances
A crime of nostalgia
—is it—to say
the "objective conditions"
seemed a favoring wind
and we younger then
—objective fact—
also a kind of subjectivity
Sails unwrapped to the breeze
no chart
Slowly repetitiously to prise
up the leaden lid where the forensic
evidence was sealed
cross-section of a slave ship
diagram of a humiliated
mind high-resolution image
of a shredded lung
color slides of refugee camps
Elsewhere
(in some calm room far from pain)
bedsprings a trunk empty
but for a scorched
length of electrical cord
how these got here from where
what would have beheld
Migrant assemblage: in its aura
immense details writhe, uprise
To imagine what Become
present thén
within the monster
nerveless and giggling
(our familiar our kin)
who did the scutwork
To differentiate
the common hell
the coils inside the brain
Scratchy cassette ribbon
history's lamentation song:
Gone, friend I tore at
time after time
in anger
gone, love I could
time upon time
nor live nor leave
gone, city
of spies and squatters
tongues and genitals
All violence is not equal
(I write this
with a clawed hand
2008
Winterface
i. hers
Mute it utters ravage guernican
mouth in bleak December
Busted-up lines of Poe:
—each separate dying ember
wreaks its ghost upon the floor
January moon-mouth
phosphorescence purged in dark to
swallow up the gone
Too soon
Dawn, twilight, wailing
newsprint, breakfast, trains
all must run their inter-
ruptured course
—So was the girl moving too fast she was moving fast
across an icy web
Was ice a mirror well the mirror was icy
And did she see herself in there
ii. his
Someone writes asking about your use
of Bayesian inference
in the history of slavery
What flares now from our burnt-up
furniture
You left your stricken briefcase here
no annotations
phantom frequencies stammer
trying to fathom
how it was inside alone where you were dying
2009
Quarto
1
Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over
The map of my battlefields. Marathon.
Wounded Knee. Vicksburg. Jericho.
Battle of the Overpass.
Victories turned inside out
But no surrender
Cemeteries of remorse
The beaten champion sobbing
Ghosts move in to shield his tears
2
No one writes lyric on a battlefield
On a map stuck with arrows
But I think I can do it if I just lurk
In my tent pretending to
Refeather my arrows
I'll be right there! I yell
When they come with their crossbows and white phosphorus
To recruit me
Crouching over my drafts
Lest they find me out
And shoot me
3
Press your cheek against my medals, listen through them to my heart
Doctor, can you see me if I'm naked?
Spent longer in this place than in the war
No one comes but rarely and I don't know what for
Went to that desert as many did before
Farewell and believing and hope not to die
Hope not to die and what was the life
Did we think was awaiting after
Lay down your stethoscope back off on your skills
Doctor can you see me when I'm naked?
4
I'll tell you about the mermaid
Sheds swimmable tail Gets legs for dancing
Sings like the sea with a choked throat
Knives straight up her spine
Lancing every step
There is a price
There is a price
For every gift
And all advice
2009
Don't Flinch
Lichen-green lines of shingle pulsate and waver
when you lift your eyes. It's the glare. Don't flinch
The news you were reading
(who tramples whom) is antique
and on the death pages you've seen already
worms doing their normal work
on the life that was: the chewers chewing
at a sensuality that wrestled doom
an anger steeped in love they can't
even taste. How could this still
shock or sicken you? Friends go missing, mute
nameless. Toss
the paper. Reach again
for the Iliad. The lines
pulse into sense. Turn up the music
Now do you hear it? can you smell smoke
under the near shingles?
2009
Black Locket
It lies in "the way of seeing the world": in the technical sacredness of seeing that world.
—Pier Paolo Pasolini, of his film Accatone
The ornament hung from my neck is a black locket
with a chain barely felt for years clasp I couldn't open
Inside: photographs of the condemned
Two
mystery planets
invaded from within
Pitcher of ice water thrown in a punched-in face
Eyes burnt back in their sockets
Negative archaeology
Driving the blind curve trapped in the blind alley
my blind spot blots the blinding
beauty of your face
I hear the colors of your voice
2009
Generosity
Death, goodlooking as only a skeleton can get
(good looks of keen intelligence)
sits poised at the typewriter, her locale, her pedestal
two books, one called Raging Beauty
another Lettera Amorosa, on this table
of drafts arguments letters
Her fine bony fingers go on calmly typing
the years at her turquoise-blue machine
(I say her but who knows death's gender
as in life there are possible variations)
Anyway he or she sat on your desk in Tucson
in the apartment where you lived then and fed me
champagne, frybread, hominy soup and gave me
her or him Later at the 7-Eleven we bought
a plastic sack of cotton to pack Death safe for travel
vagabond poet who can work anywhere
now here and of course still working
but startled by something or someone
turns her head fingers lifted in midair
for Joy Harjo
2009
VI
You, Again
Some nights I think you want too much. From me. I didn't ask
to parse again your idioms of littered
parking lots your chain-linked crane-hung sites
limp once more your crime-scene–festooned streets
to buildings I used to live in. Lose my nerve
at a wrong door on the wrong floor
in search of a time. The precision of dream is not
such a privilege. I know those hallways tiled in patterns
of oriental rugs those accordion-pleated
elevator gates. Know by heart the chipped
edges on some of those tiles. You who require this
heart-squandering want me wandering you, craving
to press a doorbell hear a lock turn, a bolt slide back
—always too much, over and over back
to the old apartment, wrong again, the key maybe
left with a super in charge of the dream who will not be found
2010
Powers of Recuperation
i
A woman of the citizen party—what's that—
is writing history backward
her body the chair she sits in
to be abandoned repossessed
The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,
second world, third world,
cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,
infectious, maiming, class
war lives on
A done matter she might have thought
ever undone though plucked
from before her birthyear
and that hyphen coming after
She's old, old, the incendiary
woman
endless beginner
whose warped wraps you shall find in graves
and behind glass plundered
ii
Streets empty now citizen rises shrugging off
her figured shirt pulls on her dark generic garment sheds
identity inklings watch, rings, ear studs
now to pocket her flashlight her tiny magnet
shut down heater finger a sleeping cat
lock inner, outer door insert
key in crevice listen once twice
to the breath of the neighborhood
take temperature of the signs a bird
scuffling a frost settling
… you left that meeting around two a.m. I thought
someone should walk with you
Didn't think then I needed that
years ravel out and now
who'd be protecting whom
I left the key in the old place
in case
iii
Spooky those streets of minds
shuttered against shatter
articulate those walls
pronouncing rage and need
fuck the cops come jesus
blow me again
Citizen walking catwise
close to the walls
heat of her lungs leaving
its trace upon the air
fingers her tiny magnet
which for the purpose of drawing
particles together will have to do
when as they say the chips are down
iv
Citizen at riverbank seven bridges
Ministers-in-exile with their aides
limb to limb dreaming underneath
conspiring by definition
Bridges trajectories arched
in shelter rendezvous
two banks to every river two directions
to every bridge
twenty-eight chances
every built thing has its unmeant purpose
v
Every built thing with its unmeant
meaning unmet purpose
every unbuilt thing
child squatting civil
engineer devising
by kerosene flare in mud
possible tunnels
carves in cornmeal mush irrigation
canals by index finger
all new learning looks at first
like chaos
the tiny magnet throbs
in citizen's pocket
vi
Bends under the arc walks bent listening for chords and codes
bat-radar-pitched or twanging
off rubber bands and wires tin-can telephony
to scribble testimony by fingernail and echo
her documentary alphabet still evolving
Walks up on the bridge windwhipped roof and trajectory
shuddering under her catpaw tread
one of seven
built things holds her suspended
between desolation
and the massive figure on unrest's verge
pondering the unbuilt city
cheek on hand and glowing eyes and
skirted knees apart
2007
Notes on the Poems
Waiting for Rain, for Music
Page 13: "Send my roots rain." Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, 1986, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 183.
Page 13: "A struggle at the roots of the mind." Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 212.
Reading the Iliad (As If ) for the First Time
Page 15: "For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors"; Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, (1940), trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill, 1956), p. 3.
Page 15: "Delusion / a daughter." See Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 394–395, bk. 19, lines 91–130.
Pages 15–16: "Horses turn away their heads / weeping." Homer, pp. 365–366, bk. 17, lines 426–440.
Fracture
Page 22: "it would be strange not to forgive." "Essentially all this is crude and meaningless … as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive … and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive"; Anton Chekhov, Themes, Thoughts, Notes and Fragments, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf.
Turbulence
Page 24: "O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer … Hold them cheap / May he who ne'er hung there"; Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, 1986, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 167.
I was there, Axel
Page 46: "The Blue Ghazals." See Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 24.
Ballade of the Poverties
Pages 55–56: This revival of an old form owes inspiration to François Villon, The Poems of François Villon, ed. and trans. Galway Kinnell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
Black Locket
Page 70: "It lies in 'the way of seeing the world' …"; Laura Betti, ed., Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Future Life (Italy: Associazione "Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini," 1989), pp. 19–20.
Generosity
Page 71: The books mentioned are James Scully, Raging Beauty: Selected Poems (Washington, D.C.: Azul Editions, 1994), and René Char, Lettera Amorosa (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), with illustrations by Georges Braque and Jean Arp.
Powers of Recuperation
Page 81: "the massive figure on unrest's verge." See Melencolia I, a 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer. The "I" is thought to refer to "Melencolia Imaginativa," one of three types of melancholy described by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535).
Acknowledgments
Some of these poems appeared in the following print and online journals, several in earlier versions:
A Public Space: "Axel Avákar," "Powers of Recuperation"
Boston Review: "Scenes of Negotiation"
Granta: "Don't Flinch"
Michigan Quarterly Review: "Benjamin Revisited," "Domain," "Waiting for Rain, for Music"
Mita'am: A Review of Literature and Radical Thought (Israel): "Powers of Recuperation" (in Hebrew translation)
Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine: "Emergency Clinic," "Ballade of the Poverties," "You Again"
/One/: The Journal of Literature, Art and Ideas (http://onethejournal.com): "Fracture"
Red Wheelbarrow: "Circum/Stances"
Seneca Review: "From Sickbed Shores"
The Best American Poetry 2009: "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve"
The Best American Poetry 2010: "Domain"
The Nation: "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve," "Quarto"
The Paris Review: "Fracture," "Innocence"
Tin House: "Generosity," "Turbulence," "Winterface"
Once again, my thanks—
to Steven Barclay, Kathryn Barcos, Sara Bixler, and Eliza Fischer at the Steven Barclay Agency
to Jill Bialosky and her colleagues at W. W. Norton & Company, with special long-term appreciation to Carol Flechner and Claire Reinertsen;
to Frances Goldin, her partners Ellen Geiger and Sam Stoloff, and their colleagues at the Frances Goldin Literary Agency: Sarah Bridgins, Matt McGowan, Phyllis Jenkins.
In sometimes demanding personal and public times, and in their many ways, I am grateful for the active intelligence and loyalty of all the above.
Copyright © 2011 by Adrienne Rich
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rich, Adrienne.
Tonight no poetry will serve : poems,
2007–2010 / Adrienne Rich. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-393-07967-8 (hardcover)
I. Title.
PS3535.I233T66 2011
811'.54—dc22
2010034593
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