… has died.
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XVI
Across a city from you, I’m with you,
just as an August night
moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,
the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table
cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight —
or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,
falling asleep to the music of the sea.
This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.
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This is one of her series of love poems, Twenty-One Love Poems. I find it a truly powerful love poem, powered by the passion of Rich’s love for her lover — a passion, as the poem tells us, that transcends time and distance.
Across a city from you, I’m with you,
Miles away from each other in the big city, we’re nonetheless together, our closeness so close it’s metaphysical.
And then she remembers, so beautifully and delicately, a scene from their life together. We’re as close now as we were then, at that moment of intense closeness, intense perfection:
just as an August night
moony, inlet-warm, seabathed, I watched you sleep,
the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table
cluttered with our brushes, books, vials in the moonlight —
or a salt-mist orchard, lying at your side
watching red sunset through the screendoor of the cabin,
G minor Mozart on the tape-recorder,
falling asleep to the music of the sea.
One night, during one of our summers at the sea, the weather was so warm, it felt as though we were wrapped in a private, protected inlet of warmth, a world entirely our own… How glorious to lie in that bed after a day of creative work together and see “the scrubbed, sheenless wood of the dressing-table” on which lay the instruments of our pursuits – brushes, books – with the clear well-used wood of that table conveying the authenticity and clarity of our summer lives. We’re just as close now as we were then, gazing at an orchard misted with seawater, listening to Mozart and to the music of the sea – beauty, natural and composed, all around us…
One of the great beauties, for UD, of this sort of modern poetry, is its strange and moving personal fabric which is not personal, because whether it’s Frank O’Hara or Adrienne Rich in this associative mood, writing this weave of place and time, UD‘s been there, listening to similar particular music over the music of the sea, watching the sunset through a screen door, and, like Rich, at once excited by the perfection of the moment, and about to fall asleep.
Great poets evoke these moments, these specific and fantastic atmospherics, generously; they make room for our own variations on them.
This island of Manhattan is wide enough
for both of us, and narrow:
I can hear your breath tonight, I know how your face
lies upturned, the halflight tracing
your generous, delicate mouth
where grief and laughter sleep together.
Wide and narrow; grief and laughter – all oppositions are resolved in love. And all distances overcome, as the disparate lovers are brought so close together that I can hear your breath.