II, from Twenty-One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich

The days are good. I’m doing something new now for work. Figures, how I only get to be happy when I’m doing something that I enjoy but getting paid very little. It’s almost a favor now to my client, hardly work, because I don’t get compensated for my worth, and I am actually fine with it. I spend my hours writing and reading about something that I will eventually have to give away, because I can’t call it my own, and because I wrote it for someone else. Figures, how I accept jobs where I write what I love but don’t earn very much from it. Somewhere, a version of me is laughing at this foolishness. But it hasn’t reached me yet; she hasn’t come forward to point fingers. So at the moment I am content. My Muse is feeling spectacular.

II
from Twenty-One Love Poems
Adrienne Rich

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone…
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carried the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

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