Toward the Solstice

I have no reason to believe that the following poem of Adrienne Rich retained its significance to her in the years since its writing over thirty years ago. It was published in her volume, The Dream of a Common Language, containing poems written between 1974 and 1977, when she was in her mid-40s. She has not chosen subsequently to include it in collections of her work spanning over a half-century of writing.

But "Toward the Solstice" was of enduring importance to me as I grew awkwardly and circuitously  through the middle years of my life, and I often shared it with my students. It was written shortly after Rich's well-known and frequently anthologized poem, "Diving Into the Wreck," which I have included in the Journeys section of Reckonings. To read the two poems together is to recognize their kinship, the need to identify and seek reconciliation with the ghosts of our past, that we may continue the birthing of our lives. In another poem from the same period, "From an Old House in America," Rich writes:

Yet something hangs between us
Older and stranger than ourselves

Like a translucent curtain, a sheet of water
A dusty window

the irreducible, incomplete connection
between the dead and living
……
All my energy reaches out tonight
To comprehend a miracle beyond

raising the dead: the undead to watch
back on the road of birth.


I should add a brief note about the solstice, those two days in the cycle of the year for which the poet waits—summer and winter, the longest and shortest days of the year, marked immemorially by our ancestors as times of transition, awareness of naturally recurrent cycles, occasions for stock taking, heightened awareness, turning respectively toward the darkness and the light. In this poem, reflecting the poet’s consciousness of unfinished work, the imagery of the one tumbles repeatedly, cumulatively into that of the other.

Imagine:

Toward the Solstice

by Adrienne Rich

The thirtieth of November.
Snow is starting to fall.
A peculiar silence is spreading
over the fields, the maple grove.
It is the thirtieth of May,
rain pours on ancient bushes, runs
down the youngest blade of grass.
I am trying to hold in one steady glance
all the parts of my life.
A spring torrent races
on this old slanting roof,
the slanted field below
thickens with winter's first whiteness.
Thistles dried to sticks in last year's wind
stand nakedly in the green,
stand sullenly in the slowly whitening field.

My brain glows
more violently, more avidly
the quieter, the thicker
the quilt of crystals settles,
the louder, more relentlessly
the torrent beats itself out
on the old boards and shingles.
It is the thirtieth of May,
the thirtieth of November,
a beginning or an end,
we are moving into the solstice
and there is so much here
I still do not understand.
If I could make sense of how
my life is still tangled
with dead weeds, thistles,
enormous burdocks, burdens
slowly shifting under
this first fall of snow,
beaten by this early, racking rain
calling all new life to declare itself strong
or die,

if I could know
in what language to address
the spirits that claim a place
beneath these low and simple ceilings,
tenants that neither speak nor stir
yet dwell in mute insistence
till I can feel utterly ghosted in this house.

If history is a spider-thread
spun over and over though brushed away
it seems I might some twilight
or dawn in the hushed country light
discern its grayness stretching
from molding or doorframe, out
into the empty dooryard
and following it climb
the path into the pinewoods,
tracing from tree to tree
in the failing light, in the slowly
lucidifying day
its constant, purposive trail,
til I reach whatever cellar hole
filling with snowflakes or lichen,
whatever fallen shack
or unremembered clearing
I am meant to have found
and there, under the first or last
star, trusting to instinct
the words would come to mind
I have failed or forgotten to say
year after year, winter
after summer, the right rune
to ease the hold of the past
upon the rest of my life
and ease my hold on the past.

If some rite of separation
is still unaccomplished
between myself and the long-gone
tenants of this house,
between myself and my childhood,
and the childhood of my children,
it is I who have neglected
to perform the needed acts,
set water in corners, light and eucalyptus
in front of mirrors,
or merely pause and listen
to my own pulse vibrating
lightly as falling snow,
relentlessly as the rainstorm,
and hear what it has been saying.
It seems I am still waiting
for them to make some clear demand
some articulate sound or gesture,
for release to come from anywhere
but from inside myself.

A decade of cutting away
dead flesh, cauterizing
old scars ripped open over and over
and still it is not enough.
A decade of performing
the loving humdrum acts
of attention to this house
transplanting lilac suckers,
washing panes, scrubbing
wood-smoke from splitting paint,
sweeping stairs, brushing the thread
of the spider aside,
and so much yet undone,
a woman's work, the solstice nearing,
and my hand still suspended
as if above a letter
I long and dread to close.