by Sharon Olds
and icy waters, and I lay in that bowl-of-
cream bed purring. The room was like the bridge of a
ship, windows angled out over the harbor—
through thick, smooth Greenland glass I
saw the port city, I curled and sinuous’d
and slow-flicked my most happy tail, and
farther into cold fog
I let him go, I lay and stretched on love’s
fucking stretcher, and let him wander on his
own the haunt salt mazes. I thought
wherever we were, we were in lasting love—
even in our separateness and
loneliness, in love—even the
iceberg just outside the mouth, its
pallid, tilting, jade-white
was love’s, as we were. We had said so. And its inner
cleavings went translucent and opaque,
violet and golden, as the afternoon passed, and there were
feathers of birds inside it preserved, and
nest-down and maybe a bootlace, even
a tern half shell, a baby shoe, love’s
tiny dory as if permanent
inside the bright overcast.
The Healers
When they say, If there are any doctors aboard,
would they make themselves known, I remember when my then
husband would rise, and I would get to be
the one he rose from beside. They say now
that it does not work, unless you are equal.
And after those first thirty years,
I was not the one he wanted to rise from
or return to—not I but she who would also
rise, when such were needed. Now I see them,
lifting, side by side, on wide,
medical, wading-bird wings—like storks with the
doctor bags of like-loves-like
dangling from their beaks. Oh well. It was the way
it was, he did not feel happy when words
were called for, and I stood.
Left-Wife Goose
Hoddley, Poddley, Puddles and Fogs,
Cats are to Marry the Poodle Dogs;
Cats in Blue Jackets and Dogs in Red Hats,
What Will Become of the Mice and Rats?
Had a trust fund, had a thief in,
Had a husband, could not keep him.
Fiddle-Dee-Dee, Fiddle-Dee-Dee,
The Fly Has Left the Humble-Bee.
They Went to the Court, and Unmarried Was She:
The Fly Has Left the Humble-Bee.
Had a sow twin, had a reap twin,
Had a husband, could not keep him.
In Marble Halls as White as Milk,
Lined with a Skin as Soft as Silk,
Within a Fountain Crystal-Clear,
A Golden Apple Doth Appear.
No Doors There Are to This Stronghold
Yet Robbers Break In and Steal the Gold.
Had an egg cow, had a cream hen,
Had a husband, could not keep him.
Formed Long Ago, Yet Made Today,
Employed While Others Sleep;
What Few Would Like to Give Away,
Nor Any Wish to Keep.
Had a nap man, had a neap man,
Had a flood man, could not keep him.
Ickle, Ockle, Blue Bockle,
Fishes in the Sea.
If You Want a Left Wife,
Please Choose Me.
Had a safe of 4X sheepskin,
Had a brook brother, could not keep him.
Inter, Mitzy, Titzy, Tool,
Ira, Dura, Dominee,
Oker, Poker, Dominocker,
Out Goes Me.
Had a lamb, slung in keepskin,
Had some ewe-milk, in it seethed him.
There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All,
Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small;
A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost Extent,
And Down at One Gulp House and Old Woman Went.
Had a rich pen, had a cheap pen,
Had a husband, could not keep him.
Put him in this nursery shell,
And here you keep him very well.
Something That Keeps
Heavy on the cupboard the wreath hangs,
the bulbs pouring up their hull withers.
Borne home, from the garlic farm,
it will last a year, she says, not
like one from Lucky’s, which could sprout, or rattle—
they sell the previous season’s, she says,
they think of it as something that keeps.
One thing that I did not think
I had to worry about was that
my then husband or I would be willing
that the spirit of the other be taken apart.
Meanwhile, I left minutes of each hour,
hours of each day, days of each week,
untended—to the whim of mildew, stallor,
and the lonesome tooth of the granary scuttler.
Girdle of curdled pubic roots,
lumped breasts, husk-spouted nipples,
eyeballs with iris gone bazook medusa,
I thought that he and I were in
some sacred precinct—which does not exist,
we were in the barn, the store, the bin,
the pan, the bowl, the breath. One two three
four five six seven eight nine ten eleven
thirty-two heads on the succulent throstle.
It is in the past, enough looking back,
it is gone, it is more over with
than the shocks of childhood. Rope of heaven,
ladder of hex, all is in
the tending, and we cannot tend
another’s rows. But I did not tend
my knowledge of who he was—nor did he
his of me, nor did he care to.
Braiding of summer, harvest, winter,
moonlight, noon, frost, enough,
lie quiet on the wall that guards the dishes,
honor the clove now gone to ash,
the clove once split at its core by the liquid shoot.
The Easel
When I build a fire, I feel purposeful—
proud I can unscrew the wing nuts
from off the rusted bolts, dis-
assembling one of the things my ex
left when he left right left. And laying its
narrow, polished, maple angles
across the kindling, providing for updraft—
good. Then by flame-light I see: I am burning
his old easel. How can that be,
after the hours and hours—all told, maybe
weeks, a month of stillness—modeling
for him, our first years together,
odor of acrylic, stretch of treated
canvas. I am burning his left-behind craft,
he who was the first to turn
our family, naked, into art.
What if someone had told me, thirty
years ago: If you give up, now,
wanting to be an artist, he might
love you all your life—what would I
have said? I didn’t even have an art,
it would come from out of our family’s life—
what could I have said: nothing will stop me.
Approaching Godthåb
So much had become so connected to him
that it seemed to belong to him, so that now,
flying, for hours, above the Atlantic
still felt like being over his realm.
And then, in the distance, a sort of land—
rows and rows of tilted, ruched-back
pyramids and fangs of snow—
appeared, and along its bitten hems, in the
water, hundreds of giant, white
beings, or rafts, nuzzled the shore,
moon-calves, stoats, dories, ships,
tankers green-shadowed cream, a family<
br />
of blossom-tree icebergs, his familiars—never
mine, but once contiguous
to what I felt was almost mine,
they were like the flowers a boreal storybook
king would give his queen, hoarfrost
lilies. It struck cold awe to my heart,
now, to look at who I had been
who had thought it was impossible
that he or I could touch another.
Tu wit, tu woo—lhude sing
goddamn, cuckoo, to look back
and see myself living, vowblind, in cloud
cuckold land. The glacierscape called it
up, the silent, shining tulle,
the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems
and corollaries, that girl who had thought
a wedding promise was binding as a law
of physics. Now, I stood outside
the kingdoms, phyla, orders, genera,
the emerald-sided frozen plenty,
as if, when he took his stones and went home, he took
snow, and ice, and glaciers, and shores,
and the sea, and the northern hemisphere,
half of the great blue-and-white aggie
itself, I sat on the air above it
and looked down on its uninhabitable beauty.
Spring
Once in a While I Gave Up
Once in a while, I gave up, and let myself
remember how much I’d liked the way my ex’s
hips were set, the head of the femur which
rode, not shallow, not deep, in the socket
of the pelvis, wrapped in the iliofemoral and
ischiofemoral ligaments,
the ball bearings suspended just so
to give him that walk. Wooden yokes, in
grade-school foreign-country-custom
movies, had moved like that, over opulent
zinc buckets of milk—the motion
was authentic, it was from another place, it was
planetary, it was model-of-the-solar-
systemic. I idolized it without
reserve, caution, or limit, I adored it with an
unprotected joy. Months,
a year later, I still dreamed it
sometimes, the illusion of a constellation
visible only from a certain vantage,
glittering peaks of his iliac crest:
A is to B up, as B is to
C across, as C is to D
down, bright winching bitings, I even
let my right hand describe
the curve of that posterior, cool
thirty-year night’s waxing gibbous
now set—in stubborn fundamentalist
conviction my hand described the mortal crescent.
To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now
Though I never saw you, only your clouds,
I was afraid of you, of how you differed
from what we had wanted you to be. And it’s as if
you waited, then, where such waiting is done,
for when I would look beside me—and here
you are, in the world of forms, where my wifehood
is now, and every action with him,
as if a thousand years from now
you and I are in some antechamber
where the difference between us is of little matter,
you with perhaps not much of a head yet,
dear garden one, you among the shovels
and spades and wafts of beekeeper’s shroud
and sky-blue kidskin gloves.
That he left me is not much, compared
to your leaving the earth—your shifting places
on it, and shifting shapes—you threw off your
working clothes of arms and legs,
and moved house, from uterus
to toilet bowl and jointed stem
and sewer out to float the rivers and
bays in painless pieces. And yet
the idea of you has come back to where
I could see you today as a small, impromptu
god of the partial. When I leave for good,
would you hold me in your blue mitt
for the departure hence. I never thought
to see you again, I never thought to seek you.
French Bra
Then low in a fancy shop window, near my
anklebone, like a Hermes heel-wing
fitted with struts and ailerons,
fragile as a silk biplane, the soutien-
gorge lies, lissome, uncharged,
slack as a snakeskin husk. I stop,
I howl in seventh-grade French. The cups are
lace net, intricate as curtains in a
bee’s house, in a kitchen where honey’s
on the stove, in the mouth, in the pants—and there are pants,
in eyelet appliqué, and there are gold
pinions like brushes of touch along the tops of the
poitrine—and it’s as if my body has not
heard, or hasn’t believed, the news,
it wants to go in there and pick up those wisps,
those hippolyta harnesses, on its pinkie,
and bring them home to my ex and me,
mon ancien mari et moi. It’s as if
I’d been in a club, with him, with secret
handshakes, and secret looks, and touches,
and charmeuse was in the club with us, and
ribbon, they were our wing’d attendants—
and satin, and dotted swiss, they were our
language, our food and furniture,
our garden and transportation and philosophy
and church, stateless state and deathless
death, our music and war. Everyone
dies. Sometimes a beloved dies,
and sometimes love. Such far worse happens,
this seems it should be a toy lament,
a doll’s dressmaker’s dummy’s song,
though people are often murdered, to celebrate
the death of love. I stand, for a moment,
looking down, at the empty costumes
of luxury, the lingerie ghosts of my sojourn.
My Son’s Father’s Smile
In my sleep, our son, as a child, said,
of his father, he smiled me—as if into
existence, into the family built around the
young lives which had come from the charged
bouquets, the dense oasis. That smile,
those years, well what can a body say, I have
been in the absolute present of a fragrant
ignorance. And to live in those rooms,
where one of his smiles might emerge, like something
almost from another place,
another time, another set
of creatures, was to feel blessed, and to be
held in mysteriousness, and a little
in mourning. The thinness of his lips gave it
a simplicity, like a child’s drawing
of a smile—a footbridge, turned over on its back, or seen
under itself, in water—and the archer’s
bow gave it a curved unerring
symmetry, a shot to the heart. I look back on that un-
clouded face yet built of cloud,
and that waning crescent moon, that look
of deep, almost sad, contentment, and know myself
lucky, that I had out the whole
night of a half-life in that archaic
hammock, in a sky whose darkness is fading, that
first dream, from which I am now waking.
Not Quiet Enough
Dread and sorrow reaching, in time, into
every reach, there comes the hour
I wonder if my husband left me
because I was not quiet enough
in our bed. I can hardly see those nights
and afternoons, anymore, those mornings,
&nbs
p; but now, for a moment, I can almost hear
the sound of him then, as if startled, or nearly
caught up with, nearly in the grip of something, then those
honeysuckle moans, trellis
and lattice to mine, in the body’s mouth-
to-mouth full-out duet. He lived
so enclosed in himself, he seemed alive not
exactly like others, but hibernating—
I called for him through solid earth
until he woke, and left. Christ if my
cries woke him. Sometimes they were only
low, drenched, lock-clicks of the breath
stopped, then drifting in mortise-light
with him.…11,000 nights,
he seemed content with me, he seemed to like
anything, any screak or high C, but were there
brayings that graded through off-key shimmer into
prism of bruise-color, were there
mortal laments, mammal shrieks against
division, as if, in sex, we practice
the cauter of being parted. Or maybe
it was not my chirps, not the sounding
flesh of those sheets, floor, chairs, back
porches, a hayloft, woods, but this telling
of them—did his spirit turn against the spirit which
tolled our private, wild bell
from the public rooftop, I who had no other
gift to give the world but to hold what I
thought was love’s mirror up to us—
ah now, no puff of mist on it.
After that life in the singing dream,
I woke, and feared he felt he was the human
sleeper, and I the glittering panther
holding him down, and screaming.
Summer
Sea-Level Elegy
Then my mind goes back to the summer rental,
the stairs down into the earth—I descend them
and turn, and pass the washing machine, and go
into the bedroom, one wall the solid
pane the warbler flew into skull-first,
the opposite wall the inches-thick
seagoing mirror. Even now,
I see us, long horizontals
in the luminous pool of the wall, speckled
by the silt of the heavy plate glass, spotted
like other animals. Above us are the pine
planks, planed, and sawn aslant,
and marked with the boot-sole ridges of the builders’