Adrienne Rich — Dialogue

She sits with one hand poised against her head, the other turning an old ring to the light for hours our talk has beaten like rain against the screens a sense of August and heat-lightening I get up, go to make tea, come back we look at each other then she says (and this is what I live through over and over)-she says: I do not know if sex is an illusion I do not know who I was when I did those things or who I said I was or whether I willed to feel what I had read about or who in fact was there with me or whether I knew, even then that there was doubt about these things