Adrienne Rich

I drew solitude over me, on the long shore. —Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude” For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be cut off from his people. —Leviticus 23:29 What is a Jew in solitude? What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own or those you have called your own? What is a woman in solitude:   a queer woman or man? In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert what in this world as it is can solitude mean? The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs with its electric gate, its perfected privacy is not what I mean the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights is not what I mean the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen is not what I mean Three thousand miles from what I once called home I open a book searching for some lines I remember about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside, something that bloomed and faded and was written down in the poet’s book, forever: Opening the poet’s book I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . .the hateful-eyed and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them Robinson Jeffers, multitude is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf, and the separate persons, stooped over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice? To wonder far from your own or those you have called your own to hear strangeness calling you from far away and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind (the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street:Make those bea woman’s footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman’s god) Find someone like yourself.   Find others. Agree you will never desert each other. Understand that any rift among you means power to those who want to do you in. Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger. But I have a nightmare to tell:   I am trying to say that to be with my people is my dearest wish but that I also love strangers that I crave separateness I hear myself stuttering these words to my worst friends and my best enemies who watch for my mistakes in grammar my mistakes in love. This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me? If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud. To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege about drifting from the center, drawn to edges, a privilege we can’t afford in the world that is, who are hated as being of our kind: faggot kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing availing his Blackness Jew deluded that she’s escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy to touch her hand;   Jew who has turned her back on midrash and mitzvah(yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?) Solitude, O taboo, endangered species on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can’t have: your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant’s hand outspread her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away? have I traded off something I don’t name? To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist? What will I do to defend my want or anyone’s want to search for her spirit-vision far from the protection of those she has called her own? Will I find O solitude your plumes, your breasts, your hair against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird’s singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song? in the old places, anywhere? What is a Jew in solitude? What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man? When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet’s headland, and the farms slide into the sea when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was founded when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes when the refugee child and the exile’s child re-open the blasted and forbidden city when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean? 1984-1985

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

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 measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces    of the mind An eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet         I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15 years to travel through me       And has taken      I am an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images    for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind.

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when she should be typing the last report of the day. If this were a map, she thinks, a map laid down to memorize because she might be walking it, it shows ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert here and there a sign of aquifers and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map it would be the map of the last age of her life, not a map of choices but a map of variations on the one great choice. It would be the map by which she could see the end of touristic choices, of distances blued and purpled by romance, by which she would recognize that poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co., mass-produced yet durable, being here now, is what it is yet a dream-map so obdurate, so plain, she thinks, the material and the dream can join and that is the poem and that is the late report. October/November 1987