The Perennial Answer
Adrienne Rich1
The way the world came swinging round my ears
I knew what Doctor meant the day he said
"Take care, unless you want to join your dead;
It's time to end this battling with your years."
He knew I'd have the blackest word told straight,
Whether it was my child that couldn't live,
Or Joel's mind, thick-riddled like a sieve
With all that loving festered into hate.
Better to know the ways you are accursed,
And stand up fierce and glad to hear the worst.
The blood is charged, the back is stiffened so.
 
Well, on that day that was a day ago,
And yet so many hours and years ago
Numbered in seizures of a darkening brain,
I started up the attic stairs again --
The fifth time in the hour -- not thinking then
That it was hot, but knowing the air sat stiller
Under the eaves than when the idiot killer
Hid in the Matthews barn among the hay
And all the neighbors through one August day
Waited outside with pitchforks in the sun.
Joel waited too, and when they heard the gun
Resound so flatly in the loft above
He was the one to give the door a shove
And climb the ladder. A man not made for love,
But built for violence; he would stand
Where lightning flashed and watch with eyes so wide
You thought the prongs of fire would strike inside;
Or sit with some decaying book in hand,
Reading of spirits and the evil-eyed,
And witches' sabbaths in a poisoned land.
 
So it was Joel that brought the fellow out,
Tarnished with hay and blood. I still can see
The eyes that Joel turned and fixed on me
When it was done -- as if by rights his wife
Should go to him for having risked his life
And say -- I hardly knew what thing he wanted.
I know it was a thing I never granted,
And what his mind became, from all that woe,
Those violent concerns he lived among,
Was on my head as well. I couldn't go,
I never went to him, I never clung
One moment on his breast, But I was young.
 
And I was cruel, a girl-bride seeing only
Her marriage as a room so strange and lonely
She looked outside for warmth, And in what fashion
Could I be vessel for that somber passion-
For Joel, decreed till death to have me all?
The tortured grandsire hanging in the hall
Depicted by a limner's crabbed hand
Seemed more a being that I could understand,
How could I help but look beyond that wall
And probe the lawful stones that built it strong
With questions sharper than a pitchfork's prong?
If Joel knew, he kept his silence long.
 
But Evans and I were hopeless from the start:
He, collared early by a rigorous creed,
Not man of men but man of God indeed,
Whose eye had seen damnation, and whose heart
Thrust all it knew of passion into one
Chamber of iron inscribed Thy will be done.
Yet sense will have revenge on one who tries
To down his senses with the brand of lies.
The road was empty from the village home,
Empty of all but us and that dark third,
The sudden Northern spring. There must be some
For whom the thrusting blood, so long deferred
In alder-stem and elm, is not the rise
Of flood in their own veins; some who can see
That green unholy dance without surprise.
I only say it has been this for me:
The time of thinnest ice, of casualty
More swift and deadly than the skater's danger,
The end of March could make me stand a stranger
On my own doorstep, and the daily shapes
Of teapot, ladle, or the china grapes
I kept in winter on the dresser shelf
Rebuked me, made me foreign to myself.
 
Evans beside me on that moonless road
Walked hard as if he thought behind us strode
Pursuers he had fled through weary ways.
He only said: "Where I was born and grew,
You felt the spring come on you like a daze
Slow out of February, and you knew
The thing you were contending with, But here --
"Spring is a bolt of lightning on the year,"
I said, "it strikes before you feel it near."
 
"The change of seasons is another thing
God put on earth to try us, I believe,
As if the breaking-out of green could bring
Escape from frozen discipline, give us leave
To taste of things by will and law forbidden."
 
"Maybe it was the weather lost us Eden,"
I said, but faltering, and the words went by
Like flights of moths under that star-soaked sky.
And that was all. He brought me to the door;
The house was dark, but on the upper floor
A light burned in the hallway. "Joel's asleep,"
I told him, and put out my hand. His touch
Was cold as candles kept unlit in church,
And yet I felt his seeking fingers creep
About my wrist and seize it in their grip
Until they hurt me.
"Neither you nor I
Have lived in Eden, but they say we die
To gain that day at last. We have to live
Believing it-what else can we believe?"
 
"Why not believe in life?" I said, but heard
Only the sanctioned automatic word
"Eternal life -- " perennial answer given
To those who ask on earth a taste of heaven.
 
The penalty you pay for dying last
Is facing those transactions from the past
That would detain you when you try to go.
All night last night I lay and seemed to hear
The to-and-fro of callers down below,
Even the knocker rattling on the door.
I thought the dead had heard my time was near
To meet them, and had come to tell me so:
But not a footstep sounded on the stair.
If they are gone it means a few days more
Are left, or they would wait. Joel would wait
Down by the dark old clock that told me late
That night from Boston. "Evans walked me home;
We sat together in the train by chance."
But not a word; only his burning glance.
"Why do you stand like that? What if I come
An hour or so after the time I said?
The house all dark, I thought you'd gone to bed."
But still that gaze, not anger, indignation,
Nor anything so easy, but a look
As fixed as when he stared upon his book.
No matter if my tale was false or true,
I was a woodcut figure on the page,
On trial for a nameless sin. Then rage
Took him like fire where lightning dives. I knew
That he could kill me then, but what he did
Was wrench me up the stairs, onto the bed.
 
The night of Joel's death I slept alone
In this same room. A neighbor said she'd stay,
Thinking the dead man lying down below
Might keep the living from rest. She told me so:
"Those hours before the dawn can lie like stone
Upon the heart -- I've lain awake -- I know."
At last I had to take the only way,
And said, "The nights he was alive and walking
From room to room and hearing spirits talking,
What sleep I had was likelier to be broken."
Her face was shocked but I was glad I'd spoken.
"Well, if you feel so -- " She would tell the tale
Next morning, but at last I was alone
In an existence finally my own.
 
And yet I knew that Evans would find reason
Why we were not our own, nor had our will
Unhindered; that disturbance of a season
So long removed was something he would kill
Yet, if he had not killed it. When I stood
Beside the churchyard fence and felt his glance
Reluctantly compelling mine, the blood
Soared to my face, the tombstones seemed to dance
Dizzily, till I turned. The eyes I met
Accused as they implored me to forget,
As if my shape had risen to destroy
Salvation's rampart with a hope of joy.
My lips betrayed their Why? but then his face
Turned from me, and I saw him leave the place.
Now Joel and Evans are neighbors, down beneath.
 
I wonder what we're bound to after death?
I wonder what's exacted of the dead,
How many debts of conscience still are good?
Not Evans or his Bible ever said
That spirit must complete what flesh and blood
Contracted in their term. What creditors
Will wait and knock for us at marble doors?
 
I'd like to know which stays when life is past:
The marriage kept in fear, the love deferred,
The footstep waited for and never heard,
The pressure of five fingers round the wrist
Stopping its beat with pain, the mouth unkissed,
The dream whose waking startles into sight
A figure mumbling by the bed at night,
The hopeless promise of eternal life --
Take now your Scripture, Evans, if you will,
And see how flimsily the pages spill
From spines reduced to dust. What have they said
Of us, to what will they pronounce me wife?
My debt is paid: the rest is on your head.
 

Adrienne Rich, from The Diamond Cutters (1955) reprinted in The Fact of a Doorframe. New York: W.W. Norton, 1984.