Adrienne Rich — Night and Days

The stars will come out over and over the hyacinths rise like flames from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway where the desolate take the sun the days will run together and stream into years as the rivers freeze and burn and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other Pictures form and dissolve in my head: we are walking in a city you fled, came back to and come back to still which I saw once through winter frost years back, before I knew you, before I knew myself. We are walking streets you have by heart from childhood streets you have graven and erased in dreams: scrolled portals, trees, nineteenth-century statues. We are holding hands so I can see everything as you see it I follow you into your dreams your past, the places none of us can explain to anyone. We are standing in the wind on an empty beach, the onslaught of the surf tells me Point Reyes, or maybe some northern Pacific shoreline neither of us has seen. In its fine spectral mist our hair is grey as the sea someone who saw us far-off would say we were two old women Norns, perhaps, or sisters of the spray but our breasts are beginning to sing together your eyes are on my mouth I wake early in the morning in a bed we have shared for years lie watching your innocent, sacred sleep as if for the first time. We have been together so many nights and days this day is not unusual. I walk to an eastern window, pull up the blinds: the city around us is still on a clear October morning wrapped in her indestructible light. The stars will come out over and over the hyacinths rise like flames from the windswept turf down the middle of upper Broadway where the desolate take the sun the days will run together and stream into years as the rivers freeze and burn and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.