II, from Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich

II, from Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich

T.

The days are good. I’m doing something new now for work. Figures, how I only get to be happy when I’m doing something that I enjoy but getting paid very little. It’s almost a favor now to my client, hardly work, because I don’t get compensated for my worth, and I am actually fine with it. I spend my hours writing and reading about something that I will eventually have to give away, because I can’t call it my own, and because I wrote it for someone else. Figures, how I accept jobs where I write what I love but don’t earn very much from it. Somewhere, a version of me is laughing at this foolishness. But it hasn’t reached me yet; she hasn’t come forward to point fingers. So at the moment I am content. My Muse is feeling spectacular.

II

from Twenty-One Love Poems

Adrienne Rich

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,

you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:

our friend the poet comes into my room

where I’ve been writing for days,

drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,

and I want to show her one poem

which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

and wake. You’ve kissed my hair

to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

I say, a poem I wanted to show someone…

and I laugh and fall dreaming again

of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

to move openly together

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

which carried the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

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