drawn as if on a barge resting on
updrafts, mild downdrops, he is like
an icon, he is like a fantasy.
I did not know him, I knew my idea
of him. The first years alone,
they said I would get over him
sometime soon, and the skin of my heart
seemed to be lying along the skin
of some naked heart. But now the invisible
streams show themselves, in their motions
of him, in the low empyrean
above the playground—look, he is out
there, casting his narrow shadow
over the faces in the carriages
in the park, and I am in here! I do not let
go of him yet, but hold the string
and watch my idea of him pull away
and stay, and pull away, my silver kite.
Red Sea
And at a party, or in any crowd, years
after he has left, there will come an almost
visible image of my ex, appearing
at the far side of a room, moving
toward me, making his way between people,
as the soul used to make its way, through
clothes, until it lay, bare,
beside the soul of the beloved, then they seemed
to swim into each other, and they sang. Before me,
on either side, facing each other
like opposing armies, two columns
of words keen and catcall to each other:
relinquishment, fastening,
abjure, trice up;
forfeiture, colligate,
disclaim, padlock;
free, ligate,
abandon, yoke,
desert, surcingle,
secede, belay;
quit, solder,
yield, snood,
leave, enchain,
release, bind;
clinch,
latchet,
suture,
peg;
splice,
wattle,
harness,
nail,
much work to be done. And Love said, to me,
What if I, myself, asked you
to love him less. And I stepped out into
the trough between the pillars, the dry
ground through the midst of the sea—the waters
a wall unto me, on the right hand,
and on the left.
Running into You
Seeing you again, after so long,
seeing you with her, and actually almost
not wanting you back,
doesn’t seem to make me feel separate from you. But you seemed
covered with her, like a child working with glue
who’s young to be working with glue. “If I could
choose, a place to die,”
it would never have been in your arms, old darling,
we figured I’d see you out, in mine,
it was never in doubt that you had suffered more than I
when young. That moved me so much about you,
the way you were a dumbstruck one
and yet you seemed to know everything
I did not know, which was everything
except the gift of gab—and oh well
dirty dancing and how to apologize.
When I went up to you two, at the art opening,
I felt I had nothing to apologize for,
I felt like a somewhat buoyant creature
with feet of I don’t know what, recovered-from sorrow,
which held me nicely to the gallery floor as to the
surface of a planet, some lunar orb
once part of the earth.
I’d Ask Him for It
Rarely, he would sing to me,
I don’t know what scale he used, maybe Arab,
seventeen steps to the octave, or Chinese,
five. It was microtonal, a-
harmonic, its staff was of the bass clef,
but I don’t know how far below baritone
it went, C below middle C or
ask it of him directly, I would be
lying along him, and would say to him,
softly, confiding, “Do me some low notes,” and he’d
open his wide, thin-lipped, tone-deaf
mouth, and seek down, for a breath
near the early deposited shales,
he would make the male soundings, and if I had been
finishing, I would again, central
level bubble of a whole note slowly
bursting. I think he loved being loved,
I think those were the cadences,
plagal, of a good, lived life.
He liked it a long time, tonic,
dominant, subdominant, and now
I want to relearn the intervals, to
journey with a man among the thirds and fifths,
augmented, diminished, with a light touch,
sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual
adores and dotes—and of course what I really
want is some low notes.
The Shore
And when I was nearing the ocean, for the first
time since we’d parted—
approaching that place where the liquid stillborn
robe pulls along pulverized boulder—
that month, each year, came back, when we’d swim,
first thing, then go back to bed, to the kelp-field, our
green hair pouring into each other’s green
hair of skull and crux bone. We were like
a shore, I thought—two elements, touching
each other, dozing in the faith that we were
knowing each other, one of us
maybe a little too much a hunter,
the other a little too polar of affection,
polar of summer mysteriousness,
magnetic in reticent mourning. His first
mate was a husky pup, who died,
from the smoke, in a fire. Someone asked him,
once, to think from the point of view
of the flames, and his face relaxed, and he said,
Delicious. I hope he can come to think
of me like that. The weeks before he left,
I’d lie on him, as if not heavy,
for a minute, after the last ferocious
ends of the world, as if loneliness had come
overland to its foreshore, breaker,
shelf, trench, and then had fallen down to where
it seemed it could not be recovered from. Elements,
protect him, and those we love, whether we both
love them or not. Physics, author of our
death, stand by us. Compass, we are sinking
down through sea-purse toward eyes on stalks.
We have always been going back, since birth,
back toward not being alive. Doing it—
it—with him, I felt I shared
a dignity, an inhuman sweetness
of his sisters and brothers the iceberg calf,
the snow ant, the lighthouse rook,
the albatross, who once it breaks out of the
shell, and rises, does not set down again.
Poem of Thanks
Years later, long single,
I want to turn to his departed back,
and say, What gifts we had of each other!
What pleasure—confiding, open-eyed,
fainting with what we were allowed to stay up
late doing. And you couldn’t say,
could you, that the touch you had from me
was other than the touch of one
who could love for life—whether we were suited
or not—for life, like a sentence. And now that I
consider, the touch that I had from you
became not the touch of the long view, but like the
tolerant wi
llingness of one
who is passing through. Colleague of sand
by moonlight—and by beach noonlight, once,
and of straw, salt bale in a barn, and mulch
inside a garden, between the rows—once-
partner of up against the wall in that tiny
bathroom with the lock that fluttered like a chrome
butterfly beside us, hip-height, the familiar
of our innocence, which was the ignorance
of what would be asked, what was required,
thank you for every hour. And I
accept your thanks, as if it were
a gift of yours, to give them—let’s part
equals, as we were in every bed, pure
equals of the earth.
Suddenly, I remember the bar
of gold my young husband bought
and buried somewhere near our farmhouse. During our
divorce—as much ours as any
Sunday dinner was, or what was
called the nap which followed it—
he wanted to go to the house, one last
time. Please, not with her,
please, and he said, All right, and I don’t know
why, when I figured it out, later,
that he’d gone to dig up our bar of gold,
I didn’t mind. I think it is because of how
even it was, between us, how even
we divided the chores, even though
he was the wage-earner, how evenly
the bounty of pleasure fell between us—
wait, what’s a bounty? Like a kidnap fee?
He fell in love with her because I
didn’t suit him anymore—
nor him, me, though I could not see it, but he
saw it for me. Even, even,
our playing field—we inspired in each other
a generousness. And he did not give
his secrets to his patients, but I gave my secrets
to you, dear strangers, and his, too—
unlike the warbling of coming, I sang
for two. Uneven, uneven, our scales
of contentment went slowly askew, and when he
hopped off, on the ground floor, and I
sailed through the air, poetic justice
was done. So when I think of him
going with his pick and shovel to exactly where he
knew the ingot was, and working his
way down, until the air
touched it and released its light,
I think he was doing what I’d been doing, but I’d
got a little ahead of him—he was
redressing the balance, he was leading his own life.
Years Later
At first glance, there on the bench
where he’d agreed to meet, it didn’t seem to be
him—but then the face of grim
friendliness was my former husband’s,
like the face of a creature looking out
from inside its Knox. No fault, no knock,
clever nut of the hearing aid
hidden in the ear I do not feel I
love anymore, small bandage on the cheek
peopled with tiny lichen from a land I don’t
know. We walk. I had not remembered
how deep he held himself inside
himself—my fun, for thirty-two years,
to lure him out. I still kind of want to,
as if I see him as a being with a baby-paw
caught. His voice is the same—low,
still pushed around the level-bubble
in his throat. We talk of the kids, and it’s
as if that will never be taken from us.
But it feels as if he’s not here—
though he’s here, it feels as if, for me,
there’s no one there—as when he was with me
it seemed there was no one there for any other
woman. For the first thirty years. Now I see
I’ve been hoping, each time we meet, that he would praise me
for how well I took it, but it’s not to be.
Are you happy as you thought you’d be,
I ask. Yes. And his smile is touchingly
pleased. I thought you’d look happier,
I say, but after all, when I am
looking at you, you’re with me! We smile.
His eyes warm, a moment, with the accustomed
shift, as if he’s turning into
the species he was for those thirty years.
And turning back. I glance toward his torso
once, his legs—he’s like a stick figure,
now, the way, when I was with him, other
men seemed like Ken dolls, all clothes. Even
the gleam of his fresh wedding ring is no
blade to my rib—this is Married Ken. As I
walk him toward his street I joke, and for an instant
he’s alive toward me, a gem of sea of
pond in his eye. Then that retreat into himself,
which always moved me, as if there were
a sideways gravity, in him, toward some
vanishing point. And no, he does not
want to meet again, in a year—when we
part, it is with a dry bow
and Good-bye. And then there is the spring park,
damp as if freshly peeled, sweet
greenhouse, green cemetery with no
dead in it—except, in some shaded
woods, under some years of leaves and
rotted cones, the body of a warbler
like a whole note fallen from the sky—my old
love for him, like a songbird’s rib cage picked clean.
September 2001, New York City
A week later, I said to a friend: I don’t
think I could ever write about it.
Maybe in a year I could write something.
There is something in me maybe someday
to be written; now it is folded, and folded,
and folded, like a note in school. And in my dream
someone was playing jacks, and in the air there was a
huge, thrown, tilted jack
on fire. And when I woke up, I found myself
counting the days since I had last seen
my ex-husband—only a few years, and some weeks
and hours. We had signed the papers and come down to the
ground floor of the Chrysler Building,
the intact beauty of its lobby around us
like a king’s tomb, on the ceiling the little
painted plane, in the mural, flying. And it
entered my strictured heart, this morning,
slightly, shyly as if warily,
untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness
and plenty of his ongoing life,
unknown to me, unseen by me,
unheard by me, untouched by me,
but known by others, seen by others,
heard, touched. And it came to me,
for moments at a time, moment after moment,
to be glad for him that he is with the one
he feels was meant for him. And I thought of my
mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five
years from her birth, the almost warbler
bones of her shoulder under my hand, the
eggshell skull, as she lay in some peace
in the clean sheets, and I could tell her the best
of my poor, partial love, I could sing her
out, with it, I saw the luck
and the luxury of that hour.
What Left?
Something like a half-person
left my young husband’s body,
and something like the other half
left my ovary. Later,
the new being, complete, slowly
left my body. And a portion of breath
left the ai
r of the delivery room,
entering the little mouth,
and the milk left the breast, and went
into the fat cuffs of the wrists.
Years later, during his cremation,
the liquids left my father’s corpse,
and the smoke left the flue. And even
later, my mother’s ashes left
my hand, and fell as seethe into the salt
chop. My then husband made
a self, a life, I made beside him
a self, a life, gestation. We grew
strong, in direction. We clarified
in vision, we deepened in our silence and our speaking.
We did not hold still, we moved, we are moving
still—we made, with each other, a moving
like a kind of music: duet; then solo,
solo. We fulfilled something in each other—
I believed in him, he believed in me, then we
grew, and grew, I grieved him, he grieved me,
I completed with him, he completed with me, we
made whole cloth together, we succeeded,
we perfected what lay between him and me,
I did not deceive him, he did not deceive me,
I did not leave him, he did not leave me,
I freed him, he freed me.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Father was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England, and The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU workshop program for residents of Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New Hampshire and in New York City.
ALSO BY SHARON OLDS
One Secret Thing
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980–2002
The Unswept Room
Blood, Tin, Straw
The Wellspring
The Father
The Gold Cell
The Dead and the Living
Satan Says