by Sharon Olds
is powerful, each mouthful holds
for a moment its amber agate shape,
I think of the sweat I sipped from my father’s
forehead the hour before his death. We talk about
those last days—that I was waiting for him to die.
You are lying on the couch, your underpants
a luminous white, your hand resting
relaxed, along the side of your penis,
we talk about your father’s illness,
your nipple like a pure circle of
something risen to the surface of your chest.
Even if we wanted to,
we could not describe it,
the end of the second glass when I sometimes
weep and you start to get sleepy—I love
to drink and cry with you, and end up
sobbing to a sleeping man, your
long body filling the couch and
draped slightly over the ends, the
untrained soft singing of your snore, it cannot be given.
Yes, we know we will make love, but we’re
not getting ready to make love,
nor are we getting over making love,
love is simply our element,
it is the summer night, we are in it.
Full Summer
I paused, and paused, over your body,
to feel the current of desire pull
and pull through me. Our hair was still wet,
mine like knotted wrack, it fell
across you as I paused, a soaked coil
around your glans. When one of your hairs
dried, it lifted like a bare nerve.
On the beach, above us, a cloud had appeared in
the clear air, a clockwise loop coming
in out of nothing, now the skin of your scrotum
moved like a live being, an animal,
I began to lick you, the foreskin lightly
stuck in one spot, like a petal, I love
to free it—just so—in joy,
and to sip from the little crying lips
at the tip. Then there was no more pausing,
nor was this the taker,
some new one came
and sucked, and up from where I had been hiding I was
drawn in a heavy spiral out of matter
over into another world
I had thought I would have to die to reach.
Am and Am Not
When I’m tilted forward, brushing my teeth,
I glance down. We do not know
ourselves. My cunt, like a hand, stroked him,
such subtle, intricate movement. Central
inside me this one I am and am not,
not only like a palm, more like a snake’s
reticulated body, rings of muscle—
like the penis outside-in, its twin.
Who is it? I lean against the sink, mouth open
and burning with Colgate, nixie palate
scoured with pond-mint; is it my soul
in there, elastic as an early creature
gone out on its own again, is it my
soul’s throat? Its rings ripple
in waves, as if it swallows, but what it
swallows stays, and grows, and grows,
we become one being, whom we hardly know,
whom we know better than we know anyone
else. And in the morning I look down. Who? What has—
what?! Seeing just the skin of the belly—
she is asleep in there, the soul, vertical
undulant one, she is dancing upright in her dream.
True Love
In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.
from Blood, Tin, Straw
The Promise
With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.
Know-Nothing
Sometimes I think I know nothing about sex.
All that I thought I was going to know,
that I did not know, I still do not know.
I think about this out of town,
on hotel elevators crowded with men.
The body of knowledge which lay somewhere
ahead of me, now I do not know where it
lies, or in the beds of strangers.
I know of sexual love, with my beloved,
but of men—I think there are women who know
men, I can’t see what it is
they know, but I feel in myself that I
could know it, or could I have been a woman who
would dare that. I don’t mean what she does
with herself, or that she would know more pleasure,
but she knows something true that I don’t know,
she knows fucking with a stranger. I feel
in awe of that, why is she not
afraid, what if she did not like
his touch, or what he said, how
would she bear it? Or maybe she has mercy on pretty much
anything a stranger would say or do,
or maybe it is not mercy
, but sex,
when she sees what he’s like, she enflames for that,
and is afraid of nothing, wanting to touch
stone desire, and know it, she is like
a god, who could have sex with stranger
after stranger—she could know men.
But what of her womb, tender core
of her being, what of her breasts’ stiff hearts,
and her dense eggs, what if she falls
in love? Maybe to know sex fully
one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Maybe only ruin could take
its full measure, as death stands
in the balance with birth, and ignorance with love.
Dear Heart,
How did you know to turn me over,
then, when I couldn’t know to take
the moment to turn and start to begin
to finish, I was out there, far ahead
of my body, far ahead of the earth,
ahead of the moon—like someone on the other
side of the moon, stepped off, facing space, I was
floating out there, splayed, facing
away, fucked, fucked, my face
glistening and distorted pressed against the inner
caul of the world. I was almost beyond
pleasure, in a region of icy, absolute
sensing, my open mouth and love-slimed
cheeks stretching the membrane the way
the face of the almost born can appear, still
veiled in its casing, just inside
the oval portal, pausing, about
to split its glistering mask—you eased me
back, drew me back into the human
night, you turned me and the howling slowed, and at the
crux of our joining, flower heads grew
fast-motion against you, swelled and burst without
tearing—ruinless death, each
sepal, each petal, came to the naught
of earth, our portion, in ecstasy, ash
to fire to ash, dust to bloom to dust.
19
When we took the acid, his wife was off
with someone else, there was a hole in their bedroom
wall where the Steuben wedding owl
had flown from one room right through into another,
I was in love with his best friend, who had
gone into a monastery
after he’d deflowered me, so we
knew each other: when he finished, under
my palm, I could feel the circular ribs of his
penis; I finished with my legs wrapped around his
leg, even with my toes pointed, my
feet reached only halfway down
his calf, later I was lying on the bathroom
floor, looking up at him, naked, he was
6′6″, a decathlete,
my eyes followed the inner line of his
leg, up, up, up,
up, up, up, up.
Weeks later, he would pull a wall-phone
out of a wall, he would cross the divider
in his Mustang at 2 a.m. with me and go
sixty, against traffic, crying, I could
hardly hear what he said about the barbed
wire and his father and his balls—but that
acid night, we stayed up all night, I was
not in love with him, so his beauty made me
happy, we chattered, we chatted naked, he
told me everything he liked
about my body—and he liked everything—
even the tiny gooseflesh bumps
around my hard nipples,
he said the way to make love to me
would be from behind, with that sheer angle, his
forefinger drew it, gently, the extreme
hairpin curve of the skinny buttocks,
he said it the way I thought an older
cousin in a dream might give advice
to a younger cousin, his fingertip
barely missing my—whatever, in love, one would
call the asshole—he regarded me with a
savoring kindness, from a cleft of sweet lust in the
human he actually looked at me
and thought how I best should be fucked. Oooh.
Oooh. It meant there was something to be done with me,
something exactly right, he looked at me
and saw it,
willing to not be the one
who did it—all night, he desired me and
protected me, he gazed at my body and un-
saw my parents’ loathing, pore by
pore on my skin he closed that couple’s eyes.
That Day
None of the pain was sharp. The sash
was pliant, its cotton blunt, like a bandage
it held my wrist to the chair. And the fierce
glazed string of the woven seat
printed me in deep pink, but I was
used to that, that matter could mark us
and its marks dissolve. That day, no one touched me,
it was a formal day, the nerves lay easy
in their planched grooves. The hunger grew, but
quietly, edgeless, a suckling in my stomach
doubling, it was a calm day
unfolding to its laws. Only the pleasure had been
sharp—the tilt of the squat bottle
over their bed, the way the ink
lowered itself, onto the spread, I had
felt its midnight, genie shape
leave my chest, pouring forth, and it was
India ink, the kind that does not come out,
I sat attached to the chair like Daphne
halfway out of the wood, and I read that blot.
I read it all day, like a Nancy Drew I was
in—they had said You won’t be fed
till you say you’re sorry, I was strangely happy, I would
never say I was sorry, I had left
that life behind. So it didn’t surprise me when she
came in slowly, holding a bowl that
held what swayed and steamed, she sat and
spoon-fed me, in silence, hot
alphabet soup. Sharp pleasure
of my wing-tip hands hung down beside me
slack as I ate, sharp pleasure of the
legible school of edible letters flowed
in, over my taste-buds, B,
O, F, K, G,
I mashed the crescent moon of the C,
caressed the E, reading with my tongue
that boiled Braille—and she was almost kneeling to me
and I wasn’t sorry. She was feeding the one
who wasn’t sorry, the way you lay food
at the foot of an image. I sat there, tied,
taking in her offering
and wildly reading as I ate, S S F
T, L W B B P Q
B, she dipped into my mouth the mild
discordant fuel—she wanted me to thrive, and decipher.
After Punishment Was Done with Me
After punishment was done with me,
after I would put my clothes back on, I’d go
back to my room, close the door,
and wander around, ending up
on the floor sometimes, always, near the baseboard,
where the vertical fall of the wall meets
the level rule of the floor—I would put
my face near that angle, and look at the dust
and anything caught in the dust. I would see
the wedding swags of old-lady-hair—
pelmets carved on cenotaph granite—and
cocoons of slough like tiny Kotexes
wound and wound in toilet paper,
I would see the anonymous crowds of grit, as if
looking down into Piazza Navona
from a mile above Il Duce, I would see
a larval casing waisted in gold
thin as the poorest gold wedding band,
and a wasp’s dried thorax and legs wound love-ring
with a pubic hair of my mother’s, I would see
the coral-maroon of the ladybug’s back
marked with its two, night genes,
I would see a fly curled up, dried,
its wings like the rabbit’s ears, or the deer’s.
I would lie quiet and look at them,
it was so peaceful there with them,
I was not at all afraid of them,
and my sadness for them didn’t matter.
I would look at each piece of lint
and half imagine being it,
I would feel that I was looking at
the universe from a great distance.
Sometimes I’d pick up a Dresden fly
and gaze at it closely, sometimes I’d idly play
house with the miniature world, weddings and
funerals with barbed body parts,
awful births, but I did not want
to disarrange that unerring deadness
like a kind of goodness, corner of wetless
grey waste, nothing the human
would go for. Without desire or rage
I would watch that dust celestium as the pain
on my matter died and turned to spirit
and wandered the cloud world of home,
the ashes of the earth.
What Is the Earth?
The earth is a homeless person. Or
the earth’s home is the atmosphere.
Or the atmosphere is the earth’s clothing,
layers of it, the earth wears all of it,
the earth is a homeless person.
Or the atmosphere is the earth’s cocoon,
which it spun itself, the earth is a larvum.
Or the atmosphere is the earth’s skin—
earth, and atmosphere, one
homeless one. Or its orbit is the earth’s
home, or the path of the orbit just
a path, the earth a homeless person.
Or the gutter of the earth’s orbit is a circle
of hell, the circle of the homeless. But the earth
has a place, around the fire, the hearth
of our star, the earth is at home, the earth
is home to the homeless. For food, and warmth,
and shelter, and health, they have earth and fire
and air and water, for home they have
the elements they are made of, as if
each homeless one were an earth, made
of milk and grain, like Ceres, and one
could eat oneself—as if the human
