Twenty-One Love Poems IX

IX

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live

I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.

It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,

even your face at another age.

Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—

a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,

a key… Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom

deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,

this inarticulate life. I’m waiting

for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water

for once, and show me what I can do

for you, who have often made the unnameable

nameable for others, even for me.

This is poem IX, 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.