My Ode to Sharon Olds on another Poetry Thursday
Recently I've taken to devouring Sharon Olds,
feeding on her words as if they are my life blood,
as if they are the last great hope of womankind,
as if they are the prayer of the famished.
All her work I own I've read before
and am now re-reading with a new hunger,
my tongue passing over my lips for every last crumb,
licking my fingers, plunging face down
into the porcelain plate of her mind.
My mouth drops in awe of her honesty
and I wonder how she does it
how she finds the courage,
how she writes with such fierce rawness,
how she can stand to stand in her nakedness,
how she risks, over and over, being misunderstood,
risks standing under the burning eyes
I know too well.
I wonder what kind of god
lives in her that doesn't live in so many others,
and at the end of every poem,
before I turn the page,
there is this moment I realize
I have not lived, I do not understand,
and I feel a sharp pang of shame and
an equally sharp pang of hunger
and then that moment passes,
extinguished in forgiveness and acceptance
and I stand in great hope of who I am and
who I am becoming.
***************************************
First Thanksgiving
Sharon Olds
from Blood, Tin, Straw
When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object,
like a soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, after him, fresh
from the other world--which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing--whirling, over the months,
in a slow blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn't need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she's fast asleep, I'll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air--I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.
