Adrienne Rich - Telephone Ringing In The Labyrinth

    
     ALSO BY ADRIENNE RICH

     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



   
     TELEPHONE RINGING
IN THE
LABYRINTH

     POEMS
2004–2006

     ADRIENNE RICH

      

     W. W. Norton & Company

     New York • London

     TO VIEW TEXT WITH LINE ENDINGS AS POET INTENDED,
PLEASE SET FONT SIZE TO THE SMALLEST SIZE ON YOUR DEVICE.



   
     FOR

     Aijaz Ahmad

     AND

     IN MEMORY OF

     F. O. Matthiessen,

     1902–1950



   
     Poetry isn't easy to come by.
You have to write it like you owe a debt to the world.
In that way poetry is how the world comes to be in you.

     —ALAN DAVIES

     Poetry is not self-expresssion, the I is a dramatic I.

     —MICHAEL S. HARPER,
QUOTING STERLING A. BROWN

     To which I would add: and so, unless
otherwise indicated, is the You.

     —A.R.



   
     CONTENTS

     I

     Voyage to the Denouement
     Calibrations
     Skeleton Key
     Wallpaper
     In Plain Sight
     Behind the Motel
     Melancholy Piano (extracts)
     II

     Archaic
     Long After Stevens
     Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir's
        "Variations on a Time Theme"
     Rhyme
     Hotel
     Three Elegies
        i. Late Style
       ii. As Ever
      iii. Fallen Figure
     Hubble Photographs: After Sappho
     This Is Not the Room
     Unknown Quantity
     Tactile Value
     Midnight, the Same Day
        i. When the sun seals my eyes the emblem
       ii. Try to rest now, says a voice
     Even Then Maybe
     Director's Notes
     Rereading The Dead Lecturer
     III

     Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender, or Judged Unfit to Send
     IV

     If/As Though
     Time Exposures
        i. Glance into glittering moisture
       ii. Is there a doctor in the house
      iii. They'd say she was humorless
      iv. When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking
       v. You've got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog
     The University Reopens as the Floods Recede
     Via Insomnia
     A Burning Kangaroo
     Ever, Again
     V

     Draft #2006
     VI

     Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth
     Notes on the Poems

     Acknowledgments



   
     I

      



    VOYAGE TO THE DENOUEMENT
     A child's hand smears a wall   the reproof is bitter   
         wall contrives to linger   child, punisher, gone in smoke
     An artisan lays on hues:   lemon, saffron, gold
         stare hard before you start covering the whole room
     Inside the thigh a sweet mole   on the balding
         skull an irregular island   what comes next
     After the burnt forests   silhouettes wade
         liquid hibiscus air
     Velvet rubs down to scrim   iron utensils
         discolor unseasoned
     Secret codes of skin and hair
         go dim   left from the light too long
     Because my wish was to have things simpler
         than they were   memory too became
     a smudge   sediment from a hand
         repeatedly lying on the same surface
     Call it a willful optimism
         from when old ownerships unpeeled    curled out
     into the still nameless   new imperium   Call it
         haplessness of a creature   not yet ready
     for her world-citizen's papers
         (Across the schoolroom mural   bravely
     small ships did under sail traverse great oceans)
         Rain rededicates the exhumed
     African burial ground
         traffic lashes its edges
     the city a scar a fragment floating
         on tidal dissolution
     The opal on my finger
         fiercely flashed till the hour it started to crumble
     2004



    CALIBRATIONS
     She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl
     where she will sit on beds and sing
     ballads from when Romany
     roamed Spain
     . . .
     A prosthetic hand calibrates perfectly
     the stem of a glass
     or how to stroke a face
     is this how far we have come
     to make love easy
     Ghost limbs go into spasm in the night
     You come back from war with the body you have
     . . .
     What you can't bear
     carry endure lift
     you'll have to drag
     it'll come with you the ghostlimb
     the shadow   blind
     echo of your body spectre of your soul
     . . .
     Let's not talk yet of making love
     nor of ingenious devices
     replacing touch
     And this is not theoretical:
     A poem with calipers to hold a heart
     so it will want to go on beating
     2004



    SKELETON KEY
     In the marina an allegro creaking
     boats on the tide
     each with its own sway
                                            rise and fall
     acceptance and refusal
     La Barqueta, My Pelican
     barometer in the body
     rising and falling
     . . .
     A small wound, swallow-shaped, on my wrist
     ripped by a thorn
     exacerbated by ash and salt
     And this is how I came to be
     protector of the private
     and enemy of the personal
     . . .
     Then I slept, and had a dream
     No more
     No màs
     From now on, only
     reason's drugged and dreamless sleep
     . . .
     Creeps down the rockface   shadow cast
     from an opposite crag exactly at that moment
     you needed light on the trail   These are the shortening days
     you forgot about   bent on your own design
     . . .
     Cut me a skeleton key
     to that other time, that city
     talk starting up, deals and poetry
     Tense with elation, exiles
     walking old neighborhoods
     calm journeys of streetcars
     revived boldness of cats
     locked eyes of couples
     music playing full blast again
     Exhuming the dead   Their questions
     2004



    WALLPAPER
     1
     A room papered with clippings:
     newsprint in bulging patches
     none of them mentions our names
     gone from that history then   O red
     kite snarled in a cloud
     small plane melted in fog:   no matter:
     I worked to keep it current
     and meaningful:   a job of living I thought
     history as wallpaper
     urgently selected clipped and pasted
     but the room itself   nowhere
     gone the address   the house
     golden-oak banisters zigzagging
     upward, stained glass on the landings
     streaked porcelain in the bathrooms
     loose floorboards quitting in haste we pried
     up to secrete the rash imagination
     of a time to come
     What we said then, our breath   remains
     otherwhere:   in me   in you
     2
     Sonata for Unaccompanied Minor
     Fugitive Variations
     discs we played over and over
     on the one-armed phonograph
     Childish we were in our adoration
     of the dead composer
     who'd ignored the weather signs
     trying to cross the Andes
     stupidly   I'd say now
     and you'd agree   seasoned
     as we are   working stretched
     weeks   eating food bought
     with ordinary grudging wages
     keeping up with rent, utilities
     a job of living as I said
     3
     Clocks are set back   quick dark
     snow filters past my lashes
     this is the common ground
     white-crusted sidewalks   windshield wipers
     licking, creaking
     to and fro   to and fro
     If the word gets out if the word
     escapes if the word
     flies if it dies
     it has its way of coming back
     The handwritings on the walls
     are vast and coded
     the music blizzards past
     2004



    IN PLAIN SIGHT
     My neighbor moving
     in a doorframe   moment's
     reach of her hand   then
     withdrawn   As from some old
                                              guilty pleasure
     Smile etched like a scar
     which must be borne
                                          Smile
     in a photograph taken against one's will
     Her son up on a ladder stringing
     along the gutter
     electric icicles in a temperate zone
     If the suffering hidden in plain sight
     is of her past her future
     or the thin-ice present where
     we're balancing here
                                         or how she sees it
     I can't presume
     . . . Ice-thin.   Cold and precarious
     the land I live in and have argued not to leave
     Cold on the verge of crease
                                                   crack without notice
     ice-green disjuncture   treasoning us
     to flounder cursing each other
     Cold and grotesque the sex
     the grimaces the grab
     A privilege   you say
     to live here   A luxury
     Everyone still wants to come here!
     You want a christmas card, a greeting
     to tide us over
     with pictures of the children
     then you demand a valentine
     an easterlily   anything for the grab
     a mothersday menu   wedding invitation
     It's not as in a museum that I
     observe
     and mark in every Face I meet
                         under crazed surfaces
     traces of feeling   locked in shadow
     Not as in a museum of history
     do I pace here   nor as one who in a show
     of bland paintings shrugs and walks on    I gaze
     through faces   not as an X-ray
                                                          nor
     as paparazzo shooting
     the compromised celebrity
     nor archaeologist filming
     the looted site
     nor as the lover tearing out of its frame
     the snapshot to be held to a flame
     but as if a mirror
     forced to reflect a room
                                           the figures
     standing   the figures crouching
     2004



    BEHIND THE MOTEL
     A man lies under a car half bare
     a child plays bullfight with a torn cloth
     hemlocks grieve in wraps of mist
     a woman talks on the phone, looks in a mirror
     fiddling with the metal pull of a drawer
     She has seen her world wiped clean, the cloth
     that wiped it disintegrate in mist
     or dying breath on the skin of a mirror
     She has felt her life close like a drawer
     has awoken somewhere else, bare
     He feels his skin as if it were mist
     as if his face would show in no mirror
     He needs some bolts he left in a vanished drawer
     crawls out into the hemlocked world with his bare
     hands, wipes his wrench on an oil-soaked cloth
     stares at the woman talking into a mirror
     who has shut the phone into the drawer
     while over and over with a torn cloth
     at the edge of hemlocks behind the bare
     motel a child taunts a horned beast made from mist
     2004



    PIANO MÉLANCOLIQUE (extraits)
    par Élise Turcotte
     N'emporte rien avec toi.
     Essayons de croire
     qu'il n'y a rien dans mes poumons.
     Qu'aucune maladie ne noircit
     tes yeux.
     Que je t'écris de la mangrove
     pour te parler des palétuviers
     qui sont les personnages
     les plus mystérieux que j'aie vu.
     Fantomatique, comme les
     arbres, je reviens aux paysages.
     Vapeurs et reflets.
     Et petites racines aériennes
     fixées au bas de ma robe.
     Je me décris comme un animal
     à plumes.
     Je décris. Tu regardes.
     Tandis que poussent mes plumes.
     La nuit, tu cherches un motif fragile,
     un relief aussi précis qu'un visage
     aimé.
     Des insectes occupent la chapelle cachée
     sous le sable.
     Beaucoup d'années ont passé
     jusqu'ici.
     C'est la nuit qui parle,
     dis-tu.
     Mon poème sans mot.
     Ma fuite en terre sauvage.
     Le corps est léger quand
     il est pris pour ce qu'il est.
     Composé de murs et de
     fenêtres.
     Prêt à brûler.
     Avec des petits drapeaux
     flottant au centre.
     Je te caresse avec le secours
     du vide.
     Une ode à la survie.
     Un dictionnaire d'herbes folles.
     Pour guérir, nous sommes prêts
     à tout.­


    MELANCHOLY PIANO (extracts)
    from the French of Élise Turcotte
     Take nothing with you.
     Let's try believing
     there's nothing in my lungs.
     That no sickness clouds
     your eyes.
     That I write you from the swamp
     to tell you about the mangroves
     the most mysterious
     presences I've seen.
     Spectral as the
     trees, I return to landscape.
     Fumes and reflections.
     And little airy roots  
     stuck to the hem of my skirt.
     I describe myself as a feathered
     animal.
     I describe.   You watch.
     While my plumes grow.
     Nights, you search for a fragile cause
     set in relief, precise as a loved
     face.
     Insects dwell in the chapel hidden
     in sand.
     Many years have gone by
     until this moment.
     Night is speaking
     you say.
     My poem without words.
     My flight into wild country.
     The body is light when
     taken for what it is.
     Formed of walls and
     windows.
     Ready to burn.
     With little flags
     fluttering   in the center.
     I touch you with the help
     of the void.
     An ode to survival.
     A dictionary of wild grasses.
     We'll do anything
     for a cure.
     2004



   
     II

      



    ARCHAIC
     Cold wit leaves me cold
     this time of the world   Multifoliate disorders
     straiten my gait   Minuets don't become me
     Been wanting to get out   see the sights
     but the exits are slick with people
     going somewhere fast
     every one with a shared past
     and a mot juste   And me so out of step
     with my late-night staircase inspirations   my
     utopian slant
     Still, I'm alive here
     in this village drawn in a tightening noose
     of ramps and cloverleafs
     but the old directions I drew up
     for you
     are obsolete
     Here's how
     to get to me
     I wrote
     Don't misconstrue the distance
     take along something for the road
     everything might be closed
     this isn't a modern place
     You arrived starving at midnight
     I gave you warmed-up food
     poured tumblers of brandy
     put on Les Barricades Mystérieuses
     —the only jazz in the house
     We talked for hours   of barricades
     lesser and greater sorrows
     ended up laughing in the thicksilver
     birdstruck light
     2005



    LONG AFTER STEVENS
     A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains
     more modern than the will
     to be modern   The mountain's profile
     in undefiled snow disdains
     definitions of poetry   It was always
     indefinite, task and destruction
     the laser eye of the poet   her blind eye
     her moment-stricken eye   her unblinking eye
     She had to get down from the blocked train
     lick snow from bare cupped hands
     taste what had soared into that air
     —local cinders, steam of the fast machine
     clear her palate with a breath   distinguish
     through tumbling whiteness   figures
     frozen   figures advancing
     weapons at the ready
     for the new password
     She had to feel her tongue
     freeze and burn at once
     instrument searching, probing
     toward a foreign tongue
     2005



    IMPROVISATION ON LINES
FROM EDWIN MUIR'S
"VARIATIONS ON A TIME THEME"
     Packed in my skin from head to toe
     Is one I know and do not know
     He never speaks to me yet is at home
     More snug than embryo in the womb . . .
     His name's Indifference
     Nothing offending he is all offence . . .
     Can note with a lack-lustre eye
     Victim and murderer go by . . .
     If I could drive this demon out
     I'd put all Time's display to rout . . .
     Or so I dream when at my door
     I hear my Soul, my Visitor.
     He comes but seldom, and I cannot tell
     If he's myself or one who loves me well
     And comes in pity, for he pities all . . .
     Victim and murderer . . . Vision's
     bloodshot wandering eye engages and
     the whetted tool moves toward the hand
     scrapes down an impassive sky   debrides
     the panicked face   erases or redresses
     with understrokes and slashes
     in smeared roughed-over surfaces
     false moves bad guesses
     pausing to gauge its own
     guilty innocence, desire
     to make it clear yet leave the field
     still dark and dialectical
     This is unpitying yet not cold
     —And Muir I wonder, standing under
     the bruised eye-socket of late-winter sun
     about your circling double-bind
     between indifference and pit
     your dream of history as Eden's
     loss, all else as repetition
     —Wonder at your old opposite
     number, Hugh MacDiarmid
     his populated outraged joy
     his ear for Lenin and for Rilke
     for the particular and vast
     the thistle's bony elegance
     the just, the wild, the urge, the cry for
     what must change what be demolished
     what secreted for the future
     bardic or technological
     together dialectical
     2005–2006



    RHYME
     Walking by the fence but the house
         not there
     going to the river but the
         river looking spare
     bones of the river spread out
         everywhere
     O tell me this is home
     Crossing the bridge but
         some planks not there
     looking at the shore but only
         getting back the glare
     dare you trust the river when there's
         no water there
     O tell me is this home
     Getting into town seeing
         nobody I know
     folks standing around
         nowhere to go
     staring into the air like
         they saw a show
     O tell me was this my home
     Come to the railroad no train
         on the tracks
     switchman in his shanty
         with a great big axe
     so what happened here so what
         are the facts
     So tell me where is my home
     2005



    HOTEL
     I dreamed the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time
     It was in New York had been there a long time
     Finnish sea-captains had stayed there in their time
     It had fallen on one then another bad time
     Now restored it wished to be or seem of the olden time
     The Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in an olden time
     There was a perpendicular lighted sign along its spine:
     THE FINNISH HOTEL and on the desk aligned
     two lamps like white globes and a blond
     wood lounge with curved chairs and a bar beyond
     serving a clear icy liquor of which the captains had been fond
     reputedly in the olden time
     In the Finnish Hotel I slept on a mattress stuffed with straw
     after drinking with a Finnish captain who regarded me with awe
     saying, Woman who could put away that much I never saw
     but I did not lie with him on the mattress, his major flaw
     being he was a phantom of the olden time
     and I a woman still almost in my prime
     dreaming the Finnish Hotel founded by Finns in the olden time
     2005



    THREE ELEGIES
     i.  LATE STYLE
     Propped on elbow in stony light
     Green lawns of entitlement
     out the window you can neither
     open nor close
     man crouched in den flung trembling
     back on failed gifts
     lapsed desire   A falling
     star   Dim, trapped
     in the narrow place of fame
     And beneath the skin of boredom
     indecipherable fear
     ii.  AS EVER
     As ever, death.   Whenever, where.   But it's
     the drawn-together life we're finally
     muted by.   Must stand, regard as whole
     what was still partial   still 
     under revision.   So it felt, so we thought. 
     Then to hear sweep
     the scythe on grass
     still witherless and sweet
     iii.  FALLEN FIGURE
     The stone walls will recede and the needs that laid them
     scar of winter sun stretch low
     behind the advancing junipers
     darkness rise up from the whitening pond
     Crusted silver your breath in this ditch
     the pitchfork in your hand
     still stuck to your hand
     The northern lights
     will float, probe, vacillate
     the yellow eye
     of the snowplow you used to drive
     will seek and find you
     2005



    HUBBLE PHOTOGRAPHS: AFTER SAPPHO
     It should be the most desired sight of all
     the person with whom you hope to live and die
     walking into a room, turning to look at you, sight for sight
     Should be yet I say there is something
     more desirable:   the ex-stasis of galaxies
     so out from us there's no vocabulary
     but mathematics and optics
     equations letting sight pierce through time
     into liberations, lacerations of light and dust
     exposed like a body's cavity, violet green livid and venous,
           gorgeous
     beyond good and evil as ever stained into dream
     beyond remorse, disillusion, fear of death
     or life, rage
     for order, rage for destruction
     —beyond this love which stirs
     the air every time she walks into the room
     These impersonae, however we call them
     won't invade us as on movie screens
     they are so old, so new, we are not to them
     we look at them or don't from within the milky gauze
     of our tilted gazing
     but they don't look back and we cannot hurt them
     for Jack Litewka
     2005



    THIS IS NOT THE ROOM
     of polished tables lit with medalled
     torsos bent toward microphones
     where ears lean hands scribble
     "working the dark side"
     —glazed eye meeting frozen eye—
     This is not the room where tears down carven
     cheeks track rivulets in the scars
     left by the gouging tool
     where wood itself is weeping
     where the ancient painted eye speaks to the living eye
     This is the room
     where truth scrubs around the pedestal of the toilet
     flings her rag into the bucket
     straightens up   spits at the mirror
     2005



    UNKNOWN QUANTITY
     Spring nights you pillow your head on a sack
     of rich compost   Charcoal, your hair
     sheds sparks through your muttered dreams
     Deep is your sleep in the starless dark
     and you wake in your live skin to show me
     a tulip   Not the prizewinning Queen of the Night
     furled in her jade wrappings
     but the Prince of Darkness, the not-yet, the X
     crouched in his pale bulb
     held out in the palm of your hand
     Shall we bury him wait and see what happens
     will there be time for waiting and to see
     2005



    TACTILE VALUE
     from crush and splinter
     death in the market
     jeering robotic
     dry-ice disrupt
     to conjure this:
     perishing
     persistent script
     scratched-up smeared
     and torn
                 let hair, nail cuttings
                 nourish the vine and fig tree
                 let man, woman
                 eat, be sheltered
     . . .
     Marx the physician laid his ear
     on the arhythmic heart
     felt the belly
     diagnosed the pain
     did not precisely write
     of lips roaming damp skin
     hand plunged in hair   bed-laughter
     mouth clasping mouth
                 (what we light with this coalspark
                 living instantly in us
                 if it continue
     2005–2006



    MIDNIGHT, THE SAME DAY
     i
     When the sun seals my eyes the emblem
     of failure will still be standing
     motionless at this intersection
     between family restaurant
     and medical clinic
     wearing his cardboard necklace lettered
     H ARD LU CK
     until his sister
     the Fury of reparations
     descends
     curdling the air in whirlwind
     tears it from his neck
     picks him up and hurls on
     ii
     Try to rest now, says a voice.
     Another:   Give yourself time.
     But rest is no act of will
     and gifts to the self come back unopened
     Milk will boil down in the iron pot
     blistering into black sugar,
     scalded vinegar lift
     crispened layers
     pages of a codex
     in a library blown away
     2005



    EVEN THEN MAYBE
     Not spent   those bloodshot friendships   those
     soul-marriages sealed and torn
     those smiles of pain
     I told her a mouthful
     I shut my mouth against him
     Throat thick with tears
     how words sound when you swallow
     —and under the roof
     of the mouth   long stroke
     reaching from the tongue's root
     No, I was not living with her at the time
     At the time I was not living
     with him, at the time we were living together
     I was living with neither of them
     —was dwelling you could say
     But as for living at that time
     we were all living together with many others
     for whom living was precisely the question
     Haven't seen evenings like that since
     vesuvian emerald to brass dissolving
     —a sentence you'd waited for
     taken back half-spoken—
     Luxury even then maybe
     evenings like those
     2005



    DIRECTOR'S NOTES
     You don't want a harsh outcry here
     not to violate the beauty yet
     dawn unveiling ochre village
     but to show coercion
     within that beauty, endurance required
     Begin with girl
     pulling hand over hand on chain
     only sound drag and creak
     in time it becomes monotonous
     then must begin sense of unease produced by monotony
     repetitive motion, repetitive sound
     resistance, irritation
     increasing for the viewers
     sense of what are they here for, anyway
     dislike of the whole thing how boring to watch
     (they aren't used to duration
     this was a test)
     Keep that dislike that boredom as a value
     also as risk
     so when bucket finally tinks at rim
     they breathe a sigh, not so much relief
     as finally grasping
     what all this was for
     dissolve as she dips from bucket
     2005



    REREADING THE DEAD LECTURER
     Overthrow.   And make new.
     An idea.   And we felt it.
     A meaning.   And we caught it
     as the dimensions spread, gathering
     in pre-utopian basements   figured shadows
     scrawled with smoke and music.
                                                           Shed the dead hand,
     let sound be sense.   A world
     echoing everywhere, Fanon, Freire, thin pamphlets lining
     raincoat pockets, poetry on walls, damp purple mimeos cranking
     —the feeling of an idea.   An idea of feeling.
     That love could be so resolute
     And the past?   Overthrow of systems, forms
     could not overthrow the past
                                                    nor our
                                                                    neglect of consequences.
     Nor that cold will we misnamed.
     There were consequences.   A world
     repeating everywhere:   the obliterations.
     What's surreal, hyperreal, virtual,
     what's poetry what's verse what's new.   What is
     a political art.   If we
     (who?) ever were conned
     into mere definitions.
                                               If we
                                                   accept
     (book of a soul contending
     2005



   
     III

      



    LETTERS CENSORED
       SHREDDED
              RETURNED TO SENDER
                     OR JUDGED UNFIT TO SEND
     Unless in quotation marks (for which see Notes on the Poems), the letter fragments are written by various imaginary persons.

     "We must prevent this mind from functioning . . .": words of the prosecutor sentencing Antonio Gramsci to prison, June 2, 1928.

     —Could you see me laboring over this
     right arm in sling, typing left-handed with one finger—
                     [On a scale of one to ten what is your pain today]
      
     —shall I measure the split atoms
     of pleasure flying outward from the core—   
      
     —To think of her naked every day unfreezes me—
      
     Banditry, rapes, burning the woods
     "a kind of primitive class struggle
     with no lasting or effective results"
     —The bakers strike, the needleworkers strike, the mechanics strike, the miners strike
     the great machine coughs out the pieces and hurtles on—
      
     —then there are days all thought comes down to sound:
     Rust.   August.   Mattress.   Must.
     Chains…
     —when consciousness + sensation feels like/ = suffering—
      
     —the people, yes,  as yet unformed—deformed—no: disinformed—
      
     —What's realistic fantasy?—Call it hope—
      
     —heard your voice on the news tonight, its minor key
     your old-fashioned mindfulness—could have loved you again—
      
     —Autumn invades my body, anger
     wrapped in forgiving sunlight, fear of the cold—
      
     —Words gather like flies above this carcass of meaning—
      
     "this void, this vacuum"
      
     —You think you are helpless because you are empty-handed
     of concepts that could become your strength—
      
     —we're told it's almost over, but we see no sign of it yet—
      
     "caught between a feeling of immense tenderness for you
     which seems . . . a weakness
     that could only be consoled
     by an immediate physical caress . . ." 
                 [We must prevent this mind from functioning for twenty years]
     ". . . and these inadequate, cold and colorless words"    
      
     ­­­—What I meant to write, belov'd critic, then struck it out   
     thinking you might accuse me of
     whatever you would:
     I wanted a sensual materialism to utter pleasure
     Something beyond a cry that could sound like a groan—
      
     —Vocalizing forbidden syllables—
      
     —our mythologies choke us, we have enthralled ourselves—
      
                 [Writing like this for the censors
                 but I won't hide behind words]
      
      "my body cells revolve in unison
     with the whole universe
     The cycle of the seasons, the progression of the solstices
and equinoxes
     I feel them as flesh of my flesh
and under the snow the first violets are already trembling
     In short, time has seemed to me a thing of flesh
     ever since space
     ceased to exist for me"
      
     —History = bodies in time—
     or, in your language:
     H = T
            b
      
     —to think of the one asleep
     in that field beside the chimney
     of the burnt-out house
     a thing of flesh, exhausted—           
      
     —this flash is all we know . . . . can we shut our eyes to it . . . ?—
      
     —more and more I dread futility—
      
     "The struggle, whose normal external expressions
     have been choked,
     attaches itself to the structure
     of the old class like a destructive gangrene . . .
     it takes on morbid forms of mysticism,
     sensualism, moral indifference,
     physical and psychic pathological depravations . . .
     The old structure does not contain and is unable
     to satisfy the new needs . . ."
      
     —Trying to hold an inner focus while hoarse laughter
     ricochets from the guardroom—
      
     —liquefaction  is a word I might use for how I would take you—
      
     —the daunted river finally              
     undammed?—
                     [prevent this mind]
     2005



   
     IV

      



    IF/AS THOUGH
     you'd spin out on your pirate platter
     chords I'd receive on my crystal set
     blues purpling burgundy goblets
     Lorca's piano spuming up champagne flutes
     could drop over any night at will
     with that bottle of Oregon Pinot to watch Alexander Nevsky
     If no curfews no blackouts no
     no-fly lists no profiling racial genital mental
     If all necessary illicits blew in
     like time-release capsules or spores in the mulch
     up-rising as morels, creviced and wild-delicious   If
     Gerard Manley Hopkins were here to make welsh rarebit
     reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland to Hart Crane in his high tenor
     guessing him captive audience to sprung rhythm   as we in lóst lóve
     sequences   hearing it
                                            skim uncurfewed, uncowled
     pelicans over spindrift beating agnostic wings
     for Ed Pavlic
     2006



    TIME EXPOSURES
     i
     Glance­­­ into glittering moisture
     webbed in lashes   unshed tears
     I'd guess as yours
     Known odor inhaled years later
     in a brief social kiss   sudden conjuncture
     soap, sweat, breath, hair   other embraces
     diffused   once, again, time's exhilarations
     ii
     Is there a doctor in the house
     who in his plain mindful way
     cared for his patients through
     pain rain and snow
     who at each and every grave
     side knew
     what could be done
     he'd done
     And where have all the patients gone
     who wanted (more than one)
     a tending hand
     across the forehead   at the end
     And what's the house?
     iii
     They'd say she was humorless
     didn't go to the parties
     giggle   show white teeth
     So would suspend her in
     their drained
     definitions
     Her body had nipples, eyes
     a tongue and other parts
     mirthful
     obscene
     which rose from love   quite often
     hilarious into daylight
     even forgetting why
     iv
     When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking
     into the long history they were made for running
     caught the train you missed sought you eye-level
     at the next station   You having run the whole way
     to seize my face between your hands   your kind
     of victory or benediction   then
     we swerved down-tunnel
     in separate cars   What is it to
     catch yourself mirror-twinned
     in an underwater window   what
     about speed   matching
     technology and desire   getting off
     at the last stop:   dispersed
     v
     You've got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog
     ocean in its shaking
     looks back at you with a blurred eye
     Who's that reflected
     naked and sundered
     reaching a hand
     Go
     down to the beach, walk in the wind
     Pick up the washed-in shell
     at your foot
     Shell castle built on sand
     your body and what's your soul?
     Is there a ghost-in-waiting?
     time to bring that one in
     2006



    THE UNIVERSITY REOPENS
AS THE FLOODS RECEDE
     Should blue air in its purity let you disdain
     the stink of artificial pine
     the gaunt architecture
     of cheap political solutions
     if there are philosophies to argue
     the moment when you would
     or wouldn't spring to shield
     a friend's body or jump
     into scummed waters after
     a stranger caught submerging
     or walk off to your parked
     car your sandwich your possible orange
     if theories rage or dance
     about this if in the event   any
     can be sure who did
     or did not act on principle or impulse
     and what's most virtuous
     can we not be nodding smiling
     taking down notes like this
     and of all places
     in a place like this
     I'll work with you on this bad matter   I can
     but won't give you the time of day
     if you think it's hypothetical
     2006



    VIA INSOMNIA
     Called up in sleep:   your voice:
     I don't know where I am . . .
     A hand, mine, stroking a white fur surface
     you as a white fur hat unstitched, outspread
     white as your cold brancusian marble head
     what animal's pelt resembles you?
     but these are my navigations:   you don't know where you are
     Is this how it is to be newly dead?   unbelieving
     the personal soul, electricity unsheathing
     from the cortex, light-waves fleeing
     into the black universe
     to lie awake half-sleeping, wondering
     Where, when will I sleep
     for Tory Dent
     2006



    A BURNING KANGAROO
     leaping forward   escaping
     out of rock reamed
     on sky
     in violet shadow
     leaping   scorched to the skin
     toward water
     (none for miles)
     Who did
                    (and can you see
     this thing
                    not as a dream
     a kangaroo
     and not in profile either
     Frontal
     in flame   no halo
     no aura   burning meat in movement
     Can
     you see with me
                               (unverified
     otherwise
     (whoever   did this thing
     2006



    EVER, AGAIN
     Mockingbird shouts Escape! Escape!
     and would I could   I'd
     fly, drive back to that house
     up the long hill between queen
     anne's lace and common daisyface
     shoulder open stuck door
     run springwater from kitchen
     tap   drench tongue
     palate and throat
     throw window sashes up screens down
     breathe in    mown grass
     pine-needle heat
     manure, lilac   unpack
     brown sacks from the store:
     ground meat, buns, tomatoes, one
     big onion, milk and orange juice
     iceberg lettuce, ranch dressing
     potato chips, dill pickles
     the Caledonian-Record
     Portuguese rosé in round-hipped flask
     open the box of newspapers by the stove
     reread:   (Vietnam Vietnam)
     Set again on the table
     the Olivetti, the stack
     of rough yellow typing paper
     mark the crashed instant
     of one summer's mosquito
     on a bedroom door
     voices of boys outside
     proclaiming twilight and hunger
     Pour iced vodka into a shotglass
     get food on the table
     sitting with those wild heads
     over hamburgers, fireflies, music
     staying up late with the typewriter
     falling asleep with the dead
     2006



   
     V

      



    DRAFT #2006
     i
     Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions.
     (What were you there for? Why did you walk out? What
 would have made you stay? Why wouldn't you listen?)
     —Couldn't you show us what you meant, can't we get it right
 this time? Can't you put it another way?—  
     (You were looking for openings where they'd been walled up—)
     —But you were supposed to be our teacher—
     (One-armed, I was trying to get you, one by one, out of that
 cellar.   It wasn't enough)
     ii
     Dreamfaces blurring horrorlands: border of poetry.
     Ebb tide sucks out clinging rockpool creatures, no swimming
 back into sleep.
     Clockface says too early, body prideful and humble shambles
 into another day, reclaiming itself piecemeal in private ritual acts.
     Reassembling the anagram scattered nightly, rebuilding daily
 the sand city.
     iii
     What's concrete for me: from there I cast out further.
     But need to be there. On the stone causeway. Baffled and
 obstinate.
     Eyes probing the dusk. Foot-slippage possible.
     iv
     Sleeping that time at the philosopher's house.   Not lovers,
 friends from the past.
     Music the vertex of our triangle.   Bach our hypotenuse
 strung between philosophy and poetry.
     Sun loosening fog on the hillside, cantata spun on the
 turntable:   Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.
     Feeling again, in our mid-forties, the old contrapuntal ten-
 sion between our natures.   The future as if still open, like
 when we were classmates.
     He'd met Heidegger in the Black Forest, corresponded
 with Foucault.  We talked about Wittgenstein.
     I was on my way to meet the one who said Philosophers have
 interpreted the world:  the point is to change it.
     v
     On a street known for beautiful shops she buys a piece of
 antique Japanese silk, a white porcelain egg.
     Had abandoned her child, later went after him, found the
 child had run away.
     Hurt and angry, joined a group to chant through the pain.
 They said, you must love yourself, give yourself gifts.
     Whatever eases you someone says, lets you forgive yourself,
 let go.
     America, someone says.
     Orphaning, orphaned here, don't even know it.
     vi
     Silent limousines meet jets descending over the Rockies.  
 Steam rooms, pure thick towels, vases of tuberose and jas-
 mine, old vintages await the après-skiers.
     Rooms of mahogany and leather, conversations open in
 international code.   Thighs and buttocks to open later by
 arrangement.
     Out of sight, out of mind, she solitary wrestles a huge
 duvet, resheathes heavy tasselled bolsters.   Bed after bed.   Nights, in her room, ices strained arms.   Rests her legs.
     Elsewhere, in Andhra Pradesh, another farmer swallows
 pesticide.
     vii
     Condemned, a clinic coughs up its detritus.
     Emergency exit, gurneys lined double, mercy draining
 down exhausted tubes.
     Drills and cranes clearing way for the new premises.
     As if I already stood at their unglazed windows, eyeing the
 distressed site through skeletal angles.
     Tenant already of the disensoulment projects.
     Had thought I deserved nothing better than these stark
 towers named for conglomerates?—a line of credit, a give-
 away?
     viii
     They asked me, is this time worse than another.
     I said, for whom?
     Wanted to show them something.   While I wrote on the
 chalkboard they drifted out. I turned back to an empty room.
     Maybe I couldn't write fast enough.  Maybe it was too soon.
     ix
     The sheer mass of the thing, its thereness, stuns thought.  
 Since it exists, it must have existed.   Will exist.   It says so
 here.
     Excruciating contempt for love.   For the strained fibre of
 common affections, mutual assistance
     sifted up from landfill, closed tunnels, drought-sheared
 riverbeds, street beds named in old census books, choked
 under the expressway.
     Teachers bricolating scattered schools of trust.   Rootlets
 watered by fugitives.
     Contraband packets, hummed messages.   Dreams of the
 descendants, surfacing.
     Hand reaching for its like exposes a scarred wrist.  
 Numerals.   A bracelet of rust.
     In a desert observatory, under plaster dust, smashed lenses
 left by the bombardments,
     star maps crackle, unscrolling.
     2006


   
     VI

      



    TELEPHONE RINGING IN THE LABYRINTH
     i
     You who can be silent in twelve languages
     trying to crease again in paling light
     the map you unfurled that morning   if
     you in your rearview mirror sighted me
     rinsing a green glass bowl
     by midsummer nightsun in, say, Reykjavík
     if at that moment my hand slipped
     and that bowl cracked to pieces
     and one piece stared at me like a gibbous moon
     if its convex reflection caught you walking
     the slurried highway shoulder after the car broke down
     if such refractions matter
     ii
     Well, I've held on   peninsula
     to continent, climber
     to rockface
     Sensual peninsula attached so   stroked
     by the tides' pensive and moody hands
     Scaler into thin air
     seen from below as weed or lichen
     improvidently fastened
     a mat of hair webbed in a bush
     A bush ignited   then
     consumed
     Violent lithography
     smolder's legacy on a boulder traced
     iii
     Image erupts from image
     atlas from vagrancy
     articulation from mammal howl
     strangeness from repetition
     even this   default location
     surveyed again   one more poem
     one more Troy or Tyre or burning tire
     seared eyeball genitals
     charred cradle
     but a different turn   working
     this passage of the labyrinth
     as laboratory
     I'd have entered, searched before
     but that ball of thread   that clew
     offering an exit choice was no gift at all
     iv
     I found you by design or
     was it your design
     or: we were drawn, we drew
     Midway in this delicate
     negotiation   telephone rings
     (Don't stop! . . . they'll call again . . .)
     Offstage the fabulous creature scrapes and shuffles
     we breathe its heavy dander
     I don't care how, if it dies   this is not the myth
     No ex/interior: compressed
     between my throat
     and yours, hilarious oxygen
     And, for the record, each did sign
     our true names on the register
     at the mouth of this hotel
     v
     I would have wanted to say it
     without falling back
     on words   Desired not
     you so much as your life,
     your prevailing   Not for me
     but for furtherance   how
     you would move
     on the horizon   You, the person, you
     the particle   fierce and furthering
     2006



   
     NOTES
ON
THE POEMS

     EPIGRAPHS
     From Alan Davies, review of Brenda Iijima's Around Sea (Oakland, Calif.: O Books, 2004), in St. Mark's in the Bowery Poetry Newsletter (April/May 2004), used by permission of Alan Davies; and from Michael S. Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
     CALIBRATIONS
     Landstuhl:  American military hospital in Germany.
     "You go to war with the army you have"; U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, December 2004.
     MELANCHOLY PIANO (extracts)
     This translation was published as part of an international poetry project by the Quebec literary magazine Estuaire and the New Review of Literature (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles) with Quebecois and Anglophone-American poets translating poems by their counterparts.
     Élise Turcotte's works include Sombre Ménagerie (Montreal: Éditions du Noroît, 2002) and Diligence (Longueuil: Les Petits Villages, 2004). Her novel The Alien House (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2004) translated into English by Sheila Fischman, received the Canadian Governor General's Prize. 
     IMPROVISATION ON LINES FROM EDWIN MUIR'S
"VARIATIONS ON A TIME THEME"
     See Edwin Muir, Collected Poems, 1921–1951 (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), and John C. Weston, ed., Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967).
     HUBBLE PHOTOGRAPHS: AFTER SAPPHO
     For Sappho, see Greek Lyric, I: Sappho, Alcaeus, trans. David A. Campbell, Loeb Classical Library 142 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982–   ), fragment 16, pp. 66–67: "Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. . . . I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians' chariots and armed infantry."
     THIS IS NOT THE ROOM
     U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney, on NBC's Meet the Press, September 16, 2001: "we also have to work, though, sort of, the dark side . . . use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."
     REREADING THE DEAD LECTURER
     See LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), The Dead Lecturer: Poems (New York: Grove, 1967).
     LETTERS CENSORED, SHREDDED, RETURNED TO SENDER,
OR JUDGED UNFIT TO SEND
     Passages in quotes are from Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, trans. Tom Nairn (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 31, 239; Antonio Gramsci, Prison Letters, ed. and trans. Hamish Henderson (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 135; and Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigeig, trans. Joseph A. Buttigeig and Antonio Callari, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), I, p. 213.
     DRAFT #2006
     vi: Out of sight, out of mind: See Carolyn Jones, "Battle of the Beds,"  San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 2005, p. A-1.


   
     ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

     My thanks to the editors of journals in which these poems first appeared, some in earlier versions:
     American Poetry Review: "Via Insomnia," "Rhyme," "Wallpaper," "Time Exposures"
     Bloom: "Hubble Photographs: After Sappho," "Midnight, the Same Day" (as "Sign")
     Monthly Review: An Independant Socialist Magazine: "Director's Notes"
     MR webzine: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org: "Tactile Value" (as "A Debt to the World")
     The Nation: "Even Then Maybe"
     The New Review of Literature: "Long after Stevens," "Melancholy Piano"
     The Progressive: "This Is Not the Room"
     The Virginia Quarterly Review: "Archaic," "Behind the Motel," "Calibrations," "In Plain Sight," "Rereading The Dead Lecturer," "Skeleton Key, "Voyage to the Dénouement," "Unknown Quantity"
     Xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics: "Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender, or Judged Unfit to Send," "Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth," "The University Reopens as the Floods Recede"
     Mandorla: Nuevas Escrituras de las Américas/New Writing from the Americas published the following in Spanish:  "Archaic," "Rereading The Dead Lecturer," "Skeleton Key."
     Mita'am: A Review of Literature and Radical Thought  (Israel) published "Even Then Maybe" and "This Is Not the Room" in Hebrew.
     I thank my editor, Jill Bialosky, and her colleagues at W. W. Norton in New York and London; our working relationship is now a story of many years
     and for their principled dedication: Frances Goldin, Steven Barclay, and their associates
     and for many kinds of talk and work over the years: Svetlana Alpers; Chantal Bizzini; David, Pablo, and Jacob Conrad; Clayton Eshleman;  Suzanne Gardinier; Albert and Barbara Gelpi; Peter Gizzi; Jack Litewka; Mark Nowak; Ed Pavlic; James Scully; Hugh Seidman; Marisol Soledad Sánchez; Helen Smelser; Jean Valentine;  Maria Luisa Vezzali; Elizabeth Willis
     and, once again, for her words, for a life: Michelle Cliff
    



   
     Copyright © 2007 by Adrienne Rich

     All rights reserved

     First Edition

     For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10110

     For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830

     Book design by Charlotte Staub

     Production manager: Anna Oler

     Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

     Rich, Adrienne Cecile.

     Telephone ringing in the labyrinth : poems, 2004–2006 / Adrienne Rich. — 1st ed.

     p.  cm.

     Includes bibliographical references.

     ISBN 978-0-393-06565-7

     I. Title.

     PS3535.I233T45  2007

     811'.54—dc22                          2007023235

     W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

     500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

     www.wwnorton.com

     W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

     Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

     1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0