by Sharon Olds
emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:
he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,
and he gave me the gift, he let me in,
knowing he would never once, in this world or in
any other, have to do it again,
and I saw him, not as he really was, I was
still without the strength of anger, but I
saw him see me, even now
that dropping down into trust’s affection
in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,
and I said, Good-bye, and he said, Good-bye,
and I closed my eyes, and rose up out of the
passenger seat in a spiral like someone
coming up out of a car gone off a
bridge into deep water. And two and
three Septembers later, and even
the September after that, that September in New York,
I was glad I had looked at him. And when I
told a friend how glad I’d been,
she said, Maybe it’s like with the families
of the dead, even the families of those
who died in the Towers—that need to see
the body, no longer inhabited
by what made them the one we loved—somehow
it helps to say good-bye to the actual,
and I saw, again, how blessed my life has been,
first, to have been able to love,
then, to have the parting now behind me,
and not to have lost him when the kids were young,
and the kids now not at all to have lost him,
and not to have lost him when he loved me, and not to have
lost someone who could have loved me for life.
Stag’s Leap
Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
His fur is rough and cozy, his face
placid, tranced, ruminant,
the bough of each furculum reaches back
to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up
and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,
unwieldy. He bears its bony tray
level as he soars from the precipice edge,
dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart
leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from,
I am half on the side of the leaver. It’s so quiet,
and empty, when he’s left. I feel like a landscape,
a ground without a figure. Sauve
qui peut—let those who can save themselves
save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone
tiny being crucified
on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched
legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he
throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his
faithfulness, as if it was
a compliment, rather than a state
of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he
feel he had to walk around
carrying my books on his head like a stack of
posture volumes, or the rack of horns
hung where a hunter washes the venison
down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,
leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old
vow have to wish him happiness
in his new life, even sexual
joy? I fear so, at first, when I still
can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy
belly, in the distance, lie the even dots
of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots
clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their
blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.
Known to Be Left
If I pass a mirror, I turn away,
I do not want to look at her,
and she does not want to be seen. Sometimes
I don’t see exactly how to go on doing this.
Often, when I feel that way,
within a few minutes I am crying, remembering
his body, or an area of it,
his backside often, a part of him
just right now to think of, luscious, not too
detailed, and his back turned to me.
After tears, the chest is less sore,
as if some goddess of humanness
within us has caressed us with a gush of tenderness.
I guess that’s how people go on, without
knowing how. I am so ashamed
before my friends—to be known to be left
by the one who supposedly knew me best,
each hour is a room of shame, and I am
swimming, swimming, holding my head up,
smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,
like being naked with the clothed, or being
a child, having to try to behave
while hating the terms of your life. In me now
there’s a being of sheer hate, like an angel
of hate. On the badminton lawn, she got
her one shot, pure as an arrow,
while through the eyelets of my blouse the no-see-ums
bit the flesh no one seems now
to care to touch. In the mirror, the torso
looks like a pinup hives martyr,
or a cream pitcher speckled with henbit and pussy-paws,
full of the milk of human kindness
and unkindness, and no one is lining up to drink.
But look! I am starting to give him up!
I believe he is not coming back. Something
has died, inside me, believing that,
like the death of a crone in one twin bed
as a child is born in the other. Have faith,
old heart. What is living, anyway,
but dying.
Object Loss
The banjo clock, suspended in thirty-weight
dreaming marriedness, for a third of a
century, doesn’t come down easy from the wall,
rusted to the hook, then it lurches up,
its gangle throat glugs. Big-headed, murmurous,
in my arms it’s like a diver’s bell,
Davy-Jonesed. When I lean it by the back
door, it tocks, and ticks, it doesn’t even
cross my mind I might wish to kick it.
Using his list, I remove his family
furnishings, the steeple clock,
the writing-arm chair, the tole-and-brass
drawing table—I had not known
how connected I’d felt, through him, to a world of
handed-down, signed, dated,
appraised things, pedigreed matter.
As I add to the stash which will go to him,
I feel as if I’m falling away
from family—as if each ponderous
object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were
the scenery of the play now closing,
lengthy run it had. My pitchfork
tilts against the wall in the dining room,
web thick in its tines, spider
dangling in one cul-de-sac…
What if loss can be without
dishonor. His harpoon—a Beothuc harpoon—
and its bone and sinew and tusk and brine-wood
creel I add to the pile, I render
unto Caesar, and my shame is winter sunlight
on a pine floor, and it moves, it sways like an old dancer.
Poem for the Breasts
Like other identical twins, they can be
better told apart in adulthood.
One is fast to wrinkle her brow,
her brain, her quick intelligence. The other
dreams inside a constellation,
freckles of Orion. They were born when I was thirteen,
they rose up, half out of m
y chest,
now they’re forty, wise, generous.
I am inside them—in a way, under them,
or I carry them, I’d been alive so many years without them.
I can’t say I am them, though their feelings are almost
my feelings, as with someone one loves. They seem,
to me, like a gift that I have to give.
That boys were said to worship their category of
being, almost starve for it,
did not escape me, and some young men
loved them the way one would want, oneself, to be loved.
All year they have been calling to my departed husband,
singing to him, like a pair of soaking
sirens on a scaled rock.
They can’t believe he’s left them, it’s not in their
vocabulary, they being made
of promise—they’re like literally kept vows.
Sometimes, now, I hold them a moment,
one in each hand, twin widows,
heavy with grief. They were a gift to me,
and then they were ours, like thirsty nurslings
of excitement and plenty. And now it’s the same
season again, the very week
he moved out. Didn’t he whisper to them,
Wait here for me one year? No.
He said, God be with you, God
by with you, God-bye, for the rest
of this life and for the long nothing. And they do not
know language, they are waiting for him, my
Christ they are dumb, they do not even
know they are mortal—sweet, I guess,
refreshing to live with, beings without
the knowledge of death, creatures of ignorant suffering.
Winter
Not Going to Him
Minute by minute, I do not get up and just
go to him—
by day, twenty blocks away;
by night, due across the city’s
woods where night-crowned heron sleep.
It is what I do now: not go, not
see or touch. And after eleven
million six hundred sixty-four thousand
minutes of not, I am a stunned knower
of not. Then I let myself picture him
a moment: the knob that seemed to surface in his
wrist after I had held my father’s
hand in coma; then up, over
his arm, with its fold, from which for a friend
he gave his blood. Then a sense of his presence
returns, his flesh which seemed, to me,
made as if before the Christian
God existed, a north-island baby’s
body become a man’s, with that pent
spirit, its heels dug in, those time-worn
heels, those elegant flat feet;
and then, in a sweep, calf shin knee thigh pelvis
waist, and I run my irises
over his feathered chest, and there,
on his neck, the scar, doll-saucer of tarnish
set in time’s throat, and up to the nape and then
dive again, as the swallows fly
at speed—cliff and barn and bank
and tree—at twilight, just over the surface
of a sloping terrain. He is alive, he breathes
and moves! My body may never learn
not to yearn for that one, or this could be
a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.
Pain I Did Not
When my husband left, there was pain I did not
feel, which those who lose the one
who loves them feel. I was not driven
against the grate of a mortal life, but
just the slowly shut gate
of preference. At times I envied them—
what I saw as the honorable suffering
of one who is thrown against that iron
grille. I think he had come, in private, to
feel he was dying, with me, and if
he had what it took to rip his way out, with his
teeth, then he could be born. And so he went
into another world—this
world, where I do not see or hear him—
and my job is to eat the whole car
of my anger, part by part, some parts
ground down to steel-dust. I like best
the cloth seats, blue-grey, first
car we bought together, long since
marked with the scrubbed stains—drool,
tears, ice cream, no wounds, but only
the month’s blood of release, and the letting
go when the water broke.
The Worst Thing
One side of the highway, the waterless hills.
The other, in the distance, the tidal wastes,
estuaries, bay, throat
of the ocean. I had not put it into
words, yet—the worst thing,
but I thought that I could say it, if I said it
word by word. My friend was driving,
sea-level, coastal hills, valley,
foothills, mountains—the slope, for both,
of our earliest years. I had been saying
that it hardly mattered to me now, the pain,
what I minded was—say there was
a god—of love—and I’d given—I had meant
to give—my life—to it—and I
had failed, well I could just suffer for that—
but what, if I,
had harmed, love? I howled this out,
and on my glasses the salt water pooled, almost
sweet to me, then, because it was named,
the worst thing—and once it was named,
I knew there was no god, there were only
people. And my friend reached over,
to where my fists clutched each other,
and the back of his hand rubbed them, a second,
with clumsiness, with the courtesy
of no eros, the homemade kindness.
Frontis Nulla Fides
Sometimes, now, I think of the back
of his head as a physiognomy,
blunt, rich as if with facial hair,
the convex stonewall shapes of the skull
like brow nose cheeks, as hard to read
as surfaces of the earth. He was as
mysterious to me as that phrenology—
occiput, lamboid—but known like a home
outcrop of rock, and his quiet had
the truthfulness, for me, of something
older than the human. I knew and did not
know his brain, and its woody mountain
casing, but the sheer familiarness
of his brow was like a kind of knowledge,
I had my favorite pores on its skin,
and the chaos, multiplicity, and
generousness of them was like
the massy stars over the desert.
He hardly ever frowned, he seemed
serene, as if above or alien
to anger. Now, I can see that his eyes
were sometimes bleak or sullen, but I saw them
as lakes—one could sound them, and receive
no sense of their bounds or beds. Something in
the paucity of his cheeks, the sunken
cheekbones, always touched me. Bold
Old English cartilage of the nose, wide
eloquent curve of the archer’s bow, its
quiver sometimes empty as if languagelessness
was a step up, in evolution,
from the chatter of consciousness. Now
that I travel the land of his sealed mask
of self in memory, again, touching
his contours, as if I am the singing blind,
I feel that ignorant love gave me
a life. But from within my illusion of him
I could not see him, or know him. I did not
; have the art or there’s no art
to find the mind’s construction in the face:
he was a gentleman on whom I built
an absolute trust.
On the Hearth of the Broken Home
Slowly fitting my pinkie tip down
into the feral eggshell fallen
from inside the chimney, I lift it up
close to my eye, the coracle dome
hung with ashes, rivered with flicks
of chint, robes of the unknown—only
a sojourner, in our home, where the heart,
after its long, good years,
was sparrow-netted to make its own
cage, jessed with its jesses, limed
with its radiant lime. And above the unclasped
tossed-off cloak of the swift, in the back
reaches of the Puritan oven, on a bed
of sprung traps, the mice in them
long gone to meltdown and to maggotmeal
and to wet dust, and dry dust,
there lies another topped shell—
next to it, its doffed skull,
tressed with spinneret sludge, speckled with
flue-mash flecks, or the morse of a species—
when I lift it up, its yolk drops out, hard
amber, light coming through it, fringed
in a tonsure of mold and soot. If I ever
prayed, as a child, for everlasting
union, these were its shoes: one dew-licked
kicked-off slipper of a being now flying, one
sunrise-milk-green boot of the dead,
which I wore, as I dreamed.
Love
I had thought it was something we were in. I had thought we were
in it that day, in the capital
of his early province—how could we
have not been in it, in our hotel bed, in the
cries through the green grass-blade. Then, knees
weak, I thought I was in it when I said
would he mind going out into the town on his own.
I knew there was sorrow there, byways, worn
scrimshaw of a child’s isolateness.
And who had pulled us down on the bed for the
second time that day, who had
given-taken the kiss that would not
stop till the cry—it was I, sir, it was I,
my lady, but I thought that all we did
was done in love’s sight. So he went out by himself
into the boyhood place of deaths