where the book falls open…

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.

from Twenty-One Love Poems in The Dream of a Common Language, by Adrienne Rich. I copied in one of the other poems on that particular page back in the spring…this is the one that speaks to me today. (yesterday I was reading one of her other books that I checked out of the library, and looking at the back jacket: she’s 75 years old…for some reason that startled me, although I guess it shouldn’t. after all, the book that I just quoted from is nearly as old as I am.)

something to keep thinking of as I try to go onward & upward.