Adrienne Rich

Memorize This

i
Love for twenty-six years, you can't stop
A withered petunia's crisp  the bud sticky  both are dark
The flower engulfed in its own purple   So common, nothing like it
The old woodstove gone to the dump
Sun plunges through the new skylight
This morning's clouds piled like autumn in Massachusetts
This afternoon's far-flung like the Mojave
Night melts one body into another
One drives fast the other maps a route
Thought new it becomes familiar
From thirteen years back maybe
One oils the hinges one edges the knives
One loses an ear-ring the other finds it
One says I'd rather make love
Than go to the Greek Festival
The other, I agree.

ii
Take a strand of your hair
on my fingers let it fall
across the pillow  lift to my nostrils
inhale your body entire

Sleeping with you after
weeks apart   how normal
yet   after midnight
to turn and slide my arm
along your thigh
drawn up in sleep
what delicate amaze

Point in Time

If she's writing a letter on a sheet of mica
to be left on the shelf of the cave
with the century's other letters each
stained with its own DNA expressed
in love's naked dark or the dawn
of a day of stone:
it's a fact like a town cross-haired on a map
But we are not keeping archives here
where all can be blown away
nor raking the graves in Pere-Lachaise
nor is she beholden or dutiful
as her pen pushes its final stroke
into the mineral page
molecule speaking to molecule
for just this moment

This is the point in time when
she must re-condense her purpose
like ink, like rain, like winter light
like foolishness and hatred
like the blood her hand first knew
as a wet patch on the staircase wall
she was feeling her way down in the dark.

---

Adrienne Rich edited Muriel Rukeyser's Selected Poems for the Library of America's American Poets Project. Her next book, The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 will be published by Norton in September. contents | next