from A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by Adrienne Rich (1970-71)

A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.

Photographer

Capture
The frame of his body
Down on one knee
Smile leaning to one side
Canon up to right eye
Shining black in the sun
His count begins at one
and two and three, Click.
And still on one knee
One two three,
Click.

goodbye

tell myself I’ll find you
tell myself its okay
try and reconcile myself
with leaving you this way
may not see you again
but still I pretend
making you promises
I won’t keep in the end

redirecting emotions

I try to redirect
the logic of my emotions
but they cut through space and time
they ache in my mind

I use mental blocks: ice, glass, stone

I twirl with pretend freedom
among crabs, sand and sea
they mix inside me

the Woman

Ah,
In the left and right of her nose
Turning from one to another
In the rolling of her shoulders
As she bent over low for him
In the lift of her bare feet
In her curves, in her style
I lost my words, in her singing
In her smile, in the swish of her hair
I forgot what I was going to say
In the mark on her creamy skin
In the bend of her legs as she shifted her weight
I lost the meaning of language, of everything. 

second

we should be second to none
what a waste it would be
how useless
the things we've become
used to

Earthly Love by Louise Glück (1999)

Conventions of the time
held them together.
It was a period
(very long) in which
the heart once given freely
was required, as a formal gesture,
to forfeit liberty: a consecration
at once moving and hopelessly doomed.


As to ourselves:
fortunately we diverged
from these requirements,
as I reminded myself
when my life shattered.
So that what we had for so long
was, more or less,
voluntary, alive.
And only long afterward
did I begin to think otherwise.


We are all human-
we protect ourselves
as well as we can
even to the point of denying
clarity, the point
of self-deception. As in
the consecration to which I alluded.


And yet, within this deception,
true happiness occurred.
So that I believe I would
repeat these errors exactly.
Nor does it seem to me
crucial to know
whether or not such happiness
is built on illusion:
it has its own reality.
And in either case, it will end.