Twenty-One Love Poems X
Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes throughour cries, our murmured dawn conspiraciesour telephone calls.
She knows—what can she know?
If in my human arrogance I claim to readher eyes,
I find there only my own animal thoughts:that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort,that voices of the psyche drive through the fleshfurther than the dense brain could have foretold,that the planetary nights are growing cold for thoseon the same journey, who want to touchone creature-traveler clear to the end;that without tenderness, we are in hell. This is poem X, 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
Twenty-One Love Poems VI
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—only the thumb is larger, longer—in these handsI could trust the world, or in many hands like these,handling power-tools or steering-wheelor touching a human face… Such hands could turnthe unborn child r...
Twenty-One Love Poems XVII
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,women at...
Twenty-One Love Poems IV
VI come home from you through the early light of springflashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,the Discount Wares, the shoe-store… I’m lugging my sackof groceries, I dash for the elevatorwhere a man, taut, elderly, carefully composedlets ...
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 ...
