Stag's Leap

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,
r />   childish joy of tiptoe. On his shoulders,

  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,