The Farmstead

it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will


-Adrienne Rich
from No more Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets. Florence Howe, ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

Close to the top
Of an encrusted dark
Converted brownstone West of Central Park
(For this was 1961)
In his room that,
                           a narrow hutch,
Was sliced from some once-cavernous flat,
Where now a window took a whole wall up
And tints were bleached-out by the sun
Of many a summer day,
We lay
            upon his hard thin bed.

He seemed all body, such
As normally you couldn’t touch,
Reckless and rough,
One of Boss Cupid’s red-
                                         haired errand boys
Who couldn’t get there fast enough.
Almost like fighting . . .
We forgot about the noise,
But feeling turned so self-delighting
That hurry soon gave way
To give-and-take,
Till each contested, for the other’s sake,
To end up not in winning and defeat
But in a draw.

A scrap of blackboard with its groove for chalk,
Nailed to a strip of lath
That had half-broken through,
The problem drafted there
                                           still incomplete.
After, I found out in the talk
Companion to a cigarette,
That he, turning the problem over yet
In his disorderly and ordered head,
Attended graduate school to teach
And study math,
                           his true
Passion cyphered in chalk beyond my reach.

-Thom Gunn
from Boss Cupid, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.