Today I’m letting Adrienne Rich say something inspiring about this sweltering night, which has me camped in front of the A/C register. I love the coolness of her images here: the blue stones in the moonlight, and her solitude “half-blotted by darkness.” Here is an excerpt from the final poem of her “Twenty-One Love Poems:”
XXI
The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stones
of the great round rippled by stone implements
the midsummer night light rising form beneath
the horizon… And this is not Stonehenge
simply nor any place but the mind
casting back to where her solitude,
shared, could be chosen without loneliness…
I choose to be a figure in that light,
half-blotted by darkness, something moving
across that space, the color of stone
greeting the moon, yet more than stone:
a woman. I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.
Between Gods 