Valediction Forbidding Mourning
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) My swirling wants. Your frozen lips. The grammar turned and attacked me. Themes, written under duress. Emptiness of the notations. They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds. I want you to see this before I leave: the experience of repetition […]
Two Songs
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) 1. Sex, as they harshly call it, I fell into this morning at ten o’clock, a drizzling hour of traffic and wet newspapers. I thought of him who yesterday clearly didn’t turn me to a hot field ready for plowing, and longing for that young man […]
Stepping Backward
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow, Next year and when I’m fifty; still good-by. This is the leave we never really take. If you were dead or gone to live in China The event might draw your stature in my mind. I should be […]
Snapshots Of A Daughter In Law By Adrienne Rich
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) 1 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: “Delicious recollections float like perfume through the memory.” Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, […]
Snapshots Of A Daughter In Law
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) 1 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: “Delicious recollections float like perfume through the memory.” Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, […]
Shattered Head
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) A life hauls itself uphill through hoar-mist steaming the sun’s tongue licking leaf upon leaf into stricken liquid When? When? cry the soothseekers but time is a bloodshot eye seeing its last of beauty its own foreclosure a bloodshot mind finding itself unspeakable What is the […]
Rural Reflections
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) 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 […]
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Either you will go through this door or you will not go through. If you go through there is always the risk of remembering your name. Things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen. If you do […]
Power
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate. Today I […]
Planetarium
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), astronomer, sister of William; and others. A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or […]
Paula Becker To Clara Westhoff
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) The autumn feels slowed down, summer still holds on here, even the light seems to last longer than it should or maybe I’m using it to the thin edge. The moon rolls in the air. I didn’t want this child. You’re the only one I’ve told. […]
Our Whole Life
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) by Adrienne Rich Our whole life a translation the permissible fibs and now a knot of lies eating at itself to get undone Words bitten thru words meanings burnt-off like paint under the blowtorch All those dead letters […]
Orion
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Far back when I went zig-zagging through tamarack pastures you were my genius, you my cast-iron Viking, my helmed lion-heart king in prison. Years later now you’re young my fierce half-brother, staring down from that simplified west your breast open, your belt dragged down by […]
On Edges
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) When the ice starts to shiver all across the reflecting basin or water-lily leaves dissect a simple surface the word ‘drowning’ flows through me. You built a glassy floor that held me as I leaned to fish for old hooks and toothed tin cans, stems lashing […]
November 1968
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Stripped you’re beginning to float free up through the smoke of brushfires and incinerators the unleafed branches won’t hold you nor the radar aerials You’re what the autumn knew would happen after the last collapse of primary color once the last absolutes were torn to […]
My Mouth Hovers Across Your Breasts
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) My mouth hovers across your breasts in the short grey winter afternoon in this bed we are delicate and touch so hot with joy we amaze ourselves tough and delicate we play rings around each other our daytime candle burns with its peculiar light and if […]
Moving In Winter
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards, is carried piecemeal through the snow; Headboard and footboard now, the bed where she has lain desiring him where overhead his sleep will build its canopy to smother her once more; their table, by four elbows worn evening after evening […]
Miracle Ice Cream
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Miracle’s truck comes down the little avenue, Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls, and, yes, you can feel happy with one piece of your heart. Take what’s still given: in a room’s rich shadow a woman’s breasts swinging lightly as she bends. Early […]
Living In Sin
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) She had thought the studio would keep itself; no dust upon the furniture of love. Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears, a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat stalking the picturesque amusing mouse had […]
Integrity
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) the quality of being complete; unbroken condition; entirety ~ Webster A wild patience has taken me this far as if I had to bring to shore a boat with a spasmodic outboard motor old sweaters, nets, spray-mottled books tossed in the prow some kind of […]
In Those Years
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we […]
In The Evening
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Three hours chain-smoking words and you move on. We stand in the porch, two archaic figures: a woman and a man. The old masters, the old sources, haven’t a clue what we’re about, shivering here in the half-dark sixties. Our minds hover in a […]
In A Classroom
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Talking of poetry, hauling the books arm-full to the table where the heads bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud, talking of consonants, elision, caught in the how, oblivious of why: I look in your face, Jude, neither frowning nor nodding, opaque in the slant of […]
Implosions
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) The world’s not wanton only wild and wavering I wanted to choose words that even you would have to be changed by Take the word of my pulse, loving and ordinary Send out your signals, hoist your dark scribbled flags but take my hand […]
I Dream I M The Death Of Orpheus
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark thrown under an arcade. I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see. I am a woman in the prime […]
From An Atlas Of The Difficult World
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in a bookstore […]
From A Survivor
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) The pact that we made was the ordinary pact of men & women in those days I don’t know who we thought we were that our personalities could resist the failures of the race Lucky or unlucky, we didn’t know the race had failures […]
Fox
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) I needed fox Badly I needed a vixen for the long time none had come near me I needed recognition from a triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said […]
For This
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) If I’ve reached for your lines (I have) like letters from the dead that stir the nerves dowsed you for a springhead to water my thirst dug into my compost skeletons and petals you surely meant to catch the light: -at work in my wormeaten […]
For The Record
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war the brooks gave no information if the mountain spewed stones of fire into the river it was not taking sides the raindrop faintly swaying under the leaf had no political opinions and if here or there […]
For The Dead
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) I dreamed I called you on the telephone to say: Be kinder to yourself but you were sick and would not answer The waste of my love goes on this way trying to save you from yourself I have always wondered about the left-over […]
Final Notions
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) It will not be simple, it will not take long It will take little time, it will take all your thought It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple It will touch […]
Diving Into The Wreck
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) by Adrienne Rich First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do […]
Diving Wreck
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) by Adrienne Rich First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do […]
Cartographies Of Silence
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) 1. A conversation begins with a lie. and each speaker of the so-called common language feels the ice-floe split, the drift apart as if powerless, as if up against a force of nature A poem can being with a lie. And be […]
Burning Oneself Out
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) We can look into the stove tonight as into a mirror, yes, the serrated log, the yellow-blue gaseous core the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes. I know inside my eyelids and underneath my skin Time takes hold of us like a draft upward, drawing […]
Aunt Jennifer039s Tigers
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. […]
Aunt Jennifers Tigers
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. […]
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
A poem by Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) My swirling wants. Your frozen lips. The grammar turned and attacked me. Themes, written under duress. Emptiness of the notations. They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds. I want you to see this before I leave: the experience of repetition […]
Vain
I O foolish tears, go back! Learn to cover your jealous pride far down in the nerveless heart that ye are voices for. Your sobbings mar the unfinished picture that my trembling life would fill up to greet its dawn. I know, poor heart, that you are reaching up to a Love that finds […]