i'm a very very complex person

Adrienne Rich, poet who changed me when I heard her work at sixteen years old, poet whose words I turned to when I first fell in love, poet of grief, poet of anger, poet of ardor--Adrienne Rich died today.

XVII
(from "Twenty-One Love Poems")

No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us,
within us and against us, against us and within us.

Okay, I really don't ever do stuff like this, but I've been seeing the poem meme that's been going around, and I couldn't resist. I really do love poetry, and I don't read it often enough. So here's my poem:

Snow-Hole

Falling asleep in the snowscape of the big double bed
I wrap my hand around your hand until they catch fire
And the snow begins to melt and we sink down and down,
The fire and ourselves, how many feet below the morning.
Should the fire burn out at the bottom of the snow-hole,
Smoke will escape up the glass chimney into the bedroom.

--Michael Longley

And because I went looking through all my poetry to find something to post, and it's far too hard to choose just one, here are a few ( more of my favorites )