A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
By Adrienne Rich
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips.
The grammar turned and attacked me.
Themes, written under duress.
Emptiness of the natations.
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of wounds.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the gailure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control.
A red plant in a cemetery of plastic wreaths.
A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlinght.
when I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those morntains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
To do something very common, in my own way.
1970 Excerpt from Andeienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, a Norton Critical Edition
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