Twenty-One Love Poems XIX

Can it be growing colder when I beginto touch myself again, adhesions pull away?

When slowly the naked face turns from staring backwardand looks into the present,the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and deathand the lips part and say:

I mean to go on living?

Am I speaking coldly when I tell you in a dreamor in this poem,

There are no miracles?(I told you from the first I wanted daily life,this island of Manhattan was island enough for me.)If I could let you know—two women together is a worknothing in civilization has make simple,two people together is a workheroic in its ordinariness,the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitchwhere the fiercest attention becomes routine—look at the faces of those who have chosen it.       This is poem

IX, from Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems collection, written between 1974-1976.  These were originally published as a complete collection but were later re-published and included as part of another collection of works, written between 1974-1977, called The Dream Of A Common Language.

Twenty-One Love Poems and The Floating Poem, (un-numbered) can all be found here at oldpoetry.