by Sharon Olds
Timberlands. And there, behind the pillows, are the
alcoves in which the owners kept lasts
of shoes, like wooden feet, Petrarchan
ankle slippers, out from the toe
the last-tip sprouting—how many times, as if
risen from inside the earth, where I’d seemed to have
ocean-fathoms-flown, with him,
scarcely recognizing, my gaze would
travel over the hermetic shapes of the
dummies shoemakers had shod. And I had clothed him
with my body and been clothed with him, again,
again, unquestioned, not fully seen,
not wanting to fully see. And now,
the image of him has gone inside
the raw closet, the naked bulb’s
blazing golden pear beside his
August-island shaggy head.
That’s it. Once, each summer, I howl,
and draw myself back, out of there, where
desire and joy, where ignorance, where
touch and the ideal, where unwilled yet willful
blindness—once a year, I have mercy,
I let myself go down where I have lived, and then,
hand over hand, I pull myself back up.
Sleekit Cowrin’
When a caught mouse corpse lay hidden, for a week,
and stuck to the floor, I started setting
the traps on a few of our wedding china
floral salad plates. Late
one night when one has sprung, I put it on
the porch, to take it to the woods in the morning, but by
morning I forget, and by noon—and by after-
noon the Blue Willow’s like a charnal roof
in Persia when the bodies of the dead were put for the
scholar vultures to pick the text
of matter and the text of spirit apart.
The mouse has become a furry barrow
burrowed into by a beetle striped
in stripes of hot and stripes of cold
coal—headfirst, it eats its way into
the stomach smoother than dirt, the mouse-bowels
saltier, beeswax and soap
stopped in the small intestinal channels.
And bugs little as seeds are seething
all over the hair, as if the rodent
were food rejoicing. And the Nicrophorus
cuts and thrusts, it rocks and rolls
its tomentose muzzle, and its wide shoulders,
in. And I know, I know, I should put
my dead marriage out on the porch
in the sun, and let who can, come
and nourish of it—change it, carry it
back to what it was assembled from,
back to the source of the light whereby it shone.
Tiny Siren
And had it been a year since I had stood,
looking down, into the Whirlpool
in the laundry nook of our August rental, not
sure what I was seeing—it looked like a girl
brought up in a net with fish. It was
a miniature woman, in a bathing suit,
lying back after the spin cycle—
the photograph of a woman, slightly
shaped over the contours of a damp towel.
I drew it out—radiant square
from some other world—maybe the daughter
of the owners of the house. And yet it looked like
someone we knew—I said, to my husband,
This was in with the sheets and towels.
Good heavens, he said. Where?! In
with the sheets and your running shorts. Doesn’t it
look like your colleague? We gazed at the smile
and the older shapely body in its gleaming
rainbow sheath—surprise trout
of wash-day. An hour later, he found me,
and told me she had given him the picture
the day that they went running together
when I was away, he must have slipped it in
his pocket, he was so shocked to see it
again, he did not know what to say.
In a novel, I said, this would be when
the wife should worry—is there even the slightest
reason to worry. He smiled at me,
and took my hand, and turned to me,
and said, it seemed not by rote,
but as if it were a physical law
of the earth, I love you. And we made love,
and I felt so close to him—I had not
known he knew how to lie, and his telling me
touched my heart. Just once, later
in the day, I felt a touch seasick, as if
a deck were tilting under me—
a run he’d taken, not mentioned in our home,
a fisher of men in the washing machine.
Just for a few minutes I had felt a little nervous.
Attempted Banquet
Lugging of shellfish in coolers, boiling
and bouillabaissing—summer luncheon
we had tried to give, canceling twice
when the parasite had come back to my gut,
then trying again, recurrent hope
of serving up the creatures of the shallow
deep. We joked about putting it off, but
underneath the joking, grim
and hidden, he wanted to leave me, and he was
working toward it and against it, maybe worried
he could not do it, longing for it
and fearing it, and not speaking of it, bent
over the shucked crustaceans and the finny
wanderers from the tide pools, their feelers which
had writhed their last in the home language.
It touches with a sharp, shelling touch,
still, to remember his joyless labor
in the heat, we sweated side by side three
times like a spell or a curse, until,
on Labor Day, the salmon at last
undulated out the kitchen door in its
half-slip of thin cucumber scales
on its fluted platter to the table laid with a
linen cloth under the old
trees of life. And almost no one
actually got there, at the last minute there were
sprains and flus and in-laws and flats
so the few of us there moved through the heavy
air like kids at an empty school on a holiday,
and the wasted food was like some kind of
carnage. We lived on it a week, as we’d been
living, without my seeing it,
on the broken habit of what was not lasting
love. When I remember him
at the stove, the sight pierces me
with tenderness, he was suffering, then,
as I would soon. When I see that day,
at moments I see it almost without guilt,
or with a pure, shared guilt,
or a shared cause, without fault, and there is
nothing to be done for it,
it can only be known and borne, it cannot be
turned into anything fruitful or sweet,
but just be faced, as what it was,
just be eaten, portion of flesh and salt.
Fall
The Haircut
Then against my will I thought of the day he’d been
sick, and I’d cut my then husband’s hair
to cheer him up. First I combed it,
sensing, with its teeth, the follicles
of his scalp. His hair was stiff from fever, close-
laid and flat, each plane a worn
conveyor belt come out of his head,
and his skull was flattish in back, with a hollow
in the center. I loved to eat-eat-eat
with the scissors, to chew sheaf. He was
so tall it was like tree husbandry,
the little bundles would accumulate,
like a medieval painting’s kindling
dropped when a meteor passed over. He was so
handsome it was kind of adorable when he
looked horrible. His face that hour was
gaunt, the runnels of his cheeks concave, his
lower eyelids and the sacks below them
ogre-swollen, but within the rims
were the deep-sea swimmers of his eyes, the sounders,
by which I read the depth of his character, not
knowing how else but by beauty to read it,
and he closed them, he bowed, I did his nape
and patted up chaff from the floor. Before sleep,
I stroked his satiny hair, the viral
sweat creaming out at its edge, I petted his
coat and he took a handful of my hair in his
fist and gripped it. Don’t be sick,
I said, OK, he said, and love
seemed to rest, on us, in a place
where, for that hour, it felt death could not
reach, and someone was singing, in my hearing, without
words, that no one can live without reaching
death, but I could have lived without having
loved almost without reserve, and for a
moment, then, I thought I lived forever with him.
Crazy
I’ve said that he and I had been crazy
for each other, but maybe my ex and I were not
crazy for each other. Maybe we
were sane for each other, as if our desire
was almost not even personal—
it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since there
seemed to be no other woman
or man in the world. Maybe it was
an arranged marriage, air and water and
earth had planned us for each other—and fire,
a fire of pleasure like a violence
of kindness. To enter those vaults together, like a
solemn or laughing couple in formal
step or writhing hair and cry, seemed to
me like the earth’s and moon’s paths,
inevitable, and even, in a way,
shy—enclosed in a shyness together,
equal in it. But maybe I
was crazy about him—it is true that I saw
that light around his head when I’d arrive second
at a restaurant—oh for God’s sake,
I was besotted with him. Meanwhile the planets
orbited each other, the morning and the evening
came. And maybe what he had for me
was unconditional, temporary
affection and trust, without romance,
though with fondness—with mortal fondness. There was no
tragedy, for us, there was
the slow-revealed comedy
of ideal and error. What precision of action
it had taken, for the bodies to hurtle through
the sky for so long without harming each other.
Discandied
When my hand is groping on the toolroom shelf for ex-
marital liquor to drink by myself,
it bumps something it knows by one bump
and rustle, one chocolate bar with almonds, then the
muffled thunk of another—he would hide them,
then give me one when I was sad. When he left,
he did not think, as who would,
to go to the caches and empty them, to the
traps and spring them. I take the fascia
of bars to the compost, denude them of their peel,
and chuck them in with the rumps and grinds,
the grounds and eden rinds,
and I carry the bowl outside, to the heap,
and trowel a pit in some eggshell crunch where the
potato sends its crisp shoots
of rage up, I tuck the cocoa
shards in—vanillin to vanillin,
very nut to very nut,
and remember how he hated it
when I tried to get him to talk to me,
tried with a certain steadiness—
nagged him to reveal himself—
maybe these desserts were not only gifts,
but bribes or stops, to close my mouth
an hour on sweetness.
Bruise Ghazal
Now a black-and-blue oval on my hip has turned blue-
violet as the ink-brand on the husk-fat of a prime
cut, sore as a lovebite, but too
large for a human mouth. I like it, my
flesh brooch—gold rim, envy-color
cameo within, and violet mottle
on which the door-handle that bit is a black
purple with wiggles like trembling decapede
legs. I count back the days, and forward
to when it will go its rot colors and then
slowly fade. Some people think I should
be over my ex by now—maybe
I thought I might have been over him more
by now. Maybe I’m half over who he
was, but not who I thought he was, and not
over the wound, sudden deathblow
as if out of nowhere, though it came from the core
of our life together. Sleep now, Sharon,
sleep. Even as we speak, the work is being
done, within. You were born to heal.
Sleep and dream—but not of his return.
Since it cannot harm him, wound him, in your dream.
Years Later
On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult
By evening, I am down to the last,
almost weightless, mineral-odored
pages of the morning paper, and as I am
letting fall what I have read,
and creasing what’s left lengthwise, the crackly
rustle and the feathery grease remind me that
what I am doing is what my then husband
did, that sitting waltz with the paper,
undressing its layers, blowsing it,
opening and closing its delicate bellows,
folding till only a single column is un-
taken in, a bone of print then
gnawed from the top down, until
the layers of the paper-wasp nest lay around him by the
couch in a greyish speckle dishevel. I left him to it,
the closest I wanted to get to the news was to
start to sleep with him, slowly, while he was
reading, the clouds of printed words
gradually becoming bedsheets around us.
When he left me, I thought, If only I had read
the paper, and vowed, In two years,
I will have the Times delivered, so here
I am, leaning back on the couch, in the smell of ink’s
oil, its molecules like chipped bits of
ammonites suspended in shale,
lead’s dust silvering me.
I have a finger, now, in the pie—
count me as a reader of the earth’s gossip.
I weep to feel how I love to be like
my guy. I taste what he tastes each morning
without moving my lips.
Maritime
Some mornings, the hem of the forewash had been almost
golden, alaskas and berings of foam
pulled along the tensile casing.
Often the surface was a ship’s grey,
a destroyer’s, flecks of sun, jellies,
sea stars, blood stars, men and women of war,
weed Venus hair. A month a year,
for thirty years. Nine hundred mornings,
sometimes we could tell, from the beach,
while taking our clothes off, how cold the water
was, by looking at it—and then,
at its icy touch,
the nipples took
their barnacle glitter, underwater
a soft frigor bathed the sex as if
drawing her detailed outline in the seeing
brain, and he braced his knees in the press
of the swell, and I dove under, and near the
floor of this life I glided between his ankles, not
knowing, until he was behind me, if I had got
through without brushing him. Then,
the getting out, rising, half-poached
egg coming up out of its shell and membrane,
weight of the breasts finding their float-point
on the air, soppy earths, all this
in the then beloved’s gaze,
the ball in the socket at the top of his thighbone
like a marrow eye through which the foreshore could have
seen us, his hip joints like the gravital centers
of my spirit. Then we’d lie, feet toward the Atlantic,
my hypothermic claw tucked
beneath the heat of his flank, under
day moon, or coming storm,
swallow, heron, prism-bow, drizzle,
osprey, test-pilot out to No Man’s.
And then, before our sight, the half world
folded on itself, and bent, and swallowed,
and opened, again, its wet, long
mouths, and drank itself.
Slowly He Starts
And slowly he starts to seem more far
away, he seems to waft, drift
at a distance, once-husband in his grey suit
with the shimmer to its weave—his hands at his sides,
as if on damselfly wings he seems
to be borne through the air past my window. And a breeze
takes him, up and about, he is like
a Chagall bridegroom, without the faith-
fulness, or with a faithfulness which can
change brides once, he is carried, on a current,
like a creature of a slightly other species,
speech unwoken, in him, as yet,
and without the weight to hold him to
the ground. Silent meteor,
summer shower of perseids,
he is floated here and there so dim and
quiet he is like a sleeper, with large,
heavy-lidded, calm eyes
open. I am glad not to have lost him
entirely, but to see him moved
at the whim of the sky, like a man in the wind,