Poetry because I'm too tired

XVIII

I'll tell you what I don't want: an affair:
love, by appointment only, twice a week;
grimy, gratuitous life lived elsewhere
with others.  When it's easier to speak
about than to you, when I think of you
more than I'm with you, more anxious than tender,
I feel less than a friend.  There's work to do.
Artist, woman, I love you; craft and gender,
if we're antagonists, aren't in dispute.
Love starts with circumstance; it grows with care
to something self-sufficient, centered, root
from which the cultivators branch, the air
renewing them transpired rich from its pores.
Or so I hoped while I was celibate.

Marilyn Hacker, from Taking Notice

and

"two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple"
Adrienne Rich, XXI Love Poems