Twenty-One Love Poems VIII
II can see myself years back at Sunion,hurting with an infected foot,
Philoctetesin woman’s form, limping the long path,lying on a headland over the dark sea,looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curlof white told me a wave had struck,imagining the pull of that water from that height,knowing deliberate suicide wasn’t my métier,yet all the time nursing, measuring that wound.
Well, that’s finished.
The woman who cherishedher suffering is dead.
I am her descendant.
I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me,but I want to go on from here with youfighting the temptation to make a career of pain. This is poem
II, 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 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 XII
Sleeping, turning in turn like planetsrotating in their midnight meadow:a touch is enough to let us knowwe’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:the dream-ghosts of two worldswalking their ghost-towns, almost address each other I’ve wak...
Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earthone bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-oldcure for fever or melancholy a tonicfor living on this earth in the winters of this climate Today...
Twenty-One Love Poems XIV
It was your vision of the pilotconfirmed my vision of you, you said He keeps on steering headlong into the waves, on purpose while we crouched in the open hatchwayvomiting into plastic bags For three hours between St Pierre and Miqu...
