Twenty-One Love Poems XI
Every peak is a crater.
This is the law of volcanoes,making them eternally and visibly female.
No height without depth, without a burning core,though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava.
I want to travel with you to every sacred mountainsmoking within like the sibyl stooped over his tripod,
I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path,to feel your arteries glowing in my clasp,never failing to note the small, jewel-like flowerunfamiliar to us, nameless till we rename her,that clings to the slowly altering rock—that detail outside ourselves that brings us to ourselves,was here before us, knew we would come, and sees beyond us. This is poem XI, 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.
Adrienne Rich
Other author posts
Rural Reflections
This is the grass your feet are planted on You paint it orange or you sing it green, But you have never foundA way to make the grass mean what you mean A cloud can be whatever you intend:
Twenty-One Love Poems VII
What kind of beast would turn its life into words What atonement is this all about --and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living
Twenty-One Love Poems XXI
The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stonesof the great round rippled by stone implementsthe midsummer night light rising form beneaththe horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”I meant this And this is not Stonehengesimply nor any place but ...
Twenty-One Love Poems XV
If I lay on that beach with youwhite, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Streamand lying on that beach we could not staybecause the wind drove fine sand against usas if it were against usif we tried to withstand it and we failed—if we drov...
