Twenty-One Love Poems VIII

VIII

I can see myself years back at Sunion,

hurting with an infected foot, Philoctetes

in woman’s form, limping the long path,

lying on a headland over the dark sea,

looking down the red rocks to where a soundless curl

of 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 cherished

her 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 you

fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

This is poem VIII, 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.