Adrienne Rich ~ Dream of a Common Language

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

Diving Into the Wreck

                 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 this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

---

The first book of poetry I bought was Adrienne Rich's Dream of a Common Language.  It was hard at the time to grasp how much of an impact she had, and was having, on the world I was coming of age in but looking back I am grateful for her strength of mind and character, as well as for her amazing poetry.  She had a beautiful courage.

The New York Times this morning opened her tribute, A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism, wrote:

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work — distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity — brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century. 

NPR's tribute, written by David Orr,  includes this recent poem entitled 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

This wonderful quote, and the photograph above of Adrienne Rich with the trees, comes from the Wordveins blog.

“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you…it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind.”
~Adrienne Rich

Read her biography at Poets.org ~ Adrienne Rich Biography. 

The poem, Diving into the Wreck, is from Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 1973 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Copyright 1973 by Adrienne Rich.

In Memoriam ~ Wislawa Szymborska

Wislawa Szymborska

One of my favorite poets passed away this week ~ Wislawa Szymborska. Read about her here in the New York Times by clicking this link ~ Wislawa Szymborska, a gentle and reclusive Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday in Krakow, Poland. She was 88.

Lot's Wife

by Wislawa Szymborska


They say I looked back out of curiosity,

but I could have had other reasons.

I looked back mourning my silver bowl.

Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.

So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous nape

Of my husband Lot’s neck.

From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead

He wouldn’t so much as hesitate.

From the disobedience of the meek.

Checking for pursuers.

Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.

---

Read three other poems from last March on East West Poetry:  Lost and Found, Birthday, and, one of my favorites, Under A Certain Star.

How to Clean Practically Anything

by Jennifer O'Grady


Yes, housework can be a chore

               A day, a day rinsed free of night

everyone enjoys a clean and orderly home

               a table wiped clear of crumbs and spills

the best way to do the maximum amount
of work, without becoming overwhelmed

               floor swept, dustpan emptied into plastic
               bags which are placed inside sealed metal cans

is to perform it in a systematic fashion

               dishwasher emptied, opaque and stainless

blot the stain, wipe away any residue

               whites now sorted, his socks, his shirts
               old egg-yolk yellow under the arms

try these to ensure results
reward your efforts:

               his underwear, the boxers faded and frayed
               repeating their pattern of angular hearts

be sure to remove any hooks or weights

               their scattered and miniature x's and o's
               openings measured for admission or exit

don't overload the machine, and remember

               his colors tangling in a tossed-off pile
               of mostly darks, mostly black and blues

fabric becomes much heavier when wet

               while here and there a spring green
               a tremulous yellow

protect from strong sunlight
and abrasive objects

               a newborn pink, streak
               of surprisingly deep red

warning: damages may not be covered

               like fresh blood, a raw and unsutured cut

try a product that claims to hide
surface scratches

               to be rinsed and wrung, dried and folded and piled
               into the thing we call a long marriage

if the marks have darkened
use a sharp knife

               these daily removals, these many attempts
               to wipe clean the counter the table the slate

if the burn is deep use filler
smoothing it to match the surface

               the windows now free of fingerprints and smears
               as if there were no glass no barrier no space

work carefully to avoid
damaging the paint

               in which to revisit your own faint reflection

this coating should last for years

---

Reading this poem snapped me back to the early years of motherhood - perhaps because I studied a similar book by Alma Chesnut Moore in trying to gain some skill in the art of keeping house. I wasn't alone in feeling confounded by domesticity - I was surrounded by creative, educated women who were suddenly home with children, laundry, surfaces to clean, furniture to fix, order to find in the daily waves of chaos that seems to follow new parents around.  To do this and anything else required a mental version of ambidexterity that I didn't possess - one mind focused on the physical and the other on the metaphysical.  I was always getting the two mixed up. This is what Jennifer O'Grady captures so perfectly here - the the waves of poetic thought lapping at the shore of the endless list of domestic to-dos and how-to-dos.  This poem appears in Poetry Daily and was originally published in Southwest Review.  If you are reading this without having read Moths, visit that page by clicking the link to find out more about Jennifer's work and read another terrific poem.   (Reprinted with permission of the author)

Images ~ Baby in the basket is by Devinf (visit to see more incredibly cute photos of baby Rune and really amazing yarn  work),  I found it first on Taylor Flannery's blog.  How To Clean Everything, one of the many editions by Alma Chesnut Moore, now available on Google Books.  The French Laundry advertisement can be found here.

Journey of the Magi

Earliest Image of the Journey of the Magi

Journey of the Magi

 by T.S. Eliot

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

---

Here's another favorite, on the occasion of Three Kings Day, or Epiphany.  I discovered while googling around that the first five lines of the poem were borrowed by Eliot from Bishop Andrewes' Christmas Day Sermon of 1622.

Bishop Lancelot Andrewes in his Christmas Day Sermon of 1622 said this of the journey of the Wise Men:

T.S. Eliot as a young man

Lancelot Andrewes

"This was nothing pleasant, for through deserts, all the way waste and desolate. Nor secondly, easy neither; for over the rocks and crags of both Arabias, specially Petra, their journey lay. Yet if safe, but it was not, but exceeding dangerous, as lying through the midst of the black tents of Kedar, a nation of thieves and cut-throats; to pass over the hills of robbers, infamous then, and infamous to this day. No passing without great troop or convoy. Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, the very dead of winter.”

- compelling words, surprisingly fresh for having been written almost four hundred years ago ~ and far more familiar to us by being quoted by T.S.Eliot at the beginning of his poem, The Journey of the Magi.

The image at top is taken from a fascinating website called History Hunters International, an archeological website exploring the layers of history and appearance of divine men through archaeological evidence.

A Thomas Merton Reader

In his book, The Seven Storey Mountain,  Merton tells us of the writing of the following poem:

While I was sitting on the terrace of the hotel, eating lunch, La Caridad del Cobra had a word to say to me.  She handed me an idea for a poem that formed so easily and smoothly and spontaneously in my mind that all I had to do was finish eating and go up to my room and type it out, almost without correction. 

So the poem turned out to be both what she had to say to me and what I had to say to her.  It was a song for La Caridad del Cobre, and it was, as far as I was concerned, something new, and the first real poem I had ever written, or anyway the one I liked best.  It pointed the way to many other poems:  it opened the gate, and set me traveling on a certain direct track that was to last me several years.

The poem said:

The white girls lift their heads like trees,
The black girls go
Reflected like Flamingoes in the street.

The white girls sing as shrill as water,
The black girls talk as quiet as clay.

The white girls open their arms like clouds,
The black girls close their eyes like wings:
Angels bow down like bells,
Angles look up like toys,

Because the heavenly stars
Stand in a ring:
And all the pieces of the mosaic, earth,
Get up and fly away like birds.



FOR MY BROTHER: REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION, 1943

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
My eyes are flowers for your tomb;
And if I cannot eat my bread,
My fasts shall live like willows where you died.
If in the heat I find no water for my thirst,
My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveller.

Where, in what desolate and smokey country,
Lies your poor body, lost and dead?
And in what landscape of disaster
Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?

Come, in my labor find a resting place
And in my sorrows lay your head,
Or rather take my life and blood
And buy yourself a better bed --
Or take my breath and take my death
And buy yourself a better rest.

When all the men of war are shot
And flags have fallen into dust,
Your cross and mine shall tell men still
Christ died on each, for both of us.

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring;
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand,
And buy you back to your own land:

The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb.
Hear them and come: they call you home.

---

These two poems have been long favorites of mine and opened a door for me when I was in college to take chances with poetry, and to assure the heart a place at each poem's core.  In the first poem, which I don't think has a name but might be called La Caridad del Cobra, he captures so something of the joy and freedom in the truth-telling nature of poetry, a way of telling by not telling, like a Zen kōan.  This is a poem you have to let follow you around for a while.  The second poem always makes me feel intensely vulnerable.  I grew up in a family deeply touched by one war and feel for the many families today who suffer with grief that has no words.  Here Merton's poem is a gift to help give voice to the grief in the loss of a loved one.  It is so filled with heart that that the images shimmer on the edge of the poem like the skin of a bubble, buoyant with love and grief, irresistibly translucent.  He captures the life of grief in a way I've never found so well expressed.  These are borrowed from Google Books, A Thomas Merton Reader by Thomas P. McDonnell. 

See too the sensitive work of Sister Thérèse Lentfoehr in Words and Silence, on the Poetry of Thomas Merton, a book I've carried since my college days.