national poetry month, day 12.

Sharon Olds is my favorite poet. She's written poems about her diaphragm, her divorce, the pope's penis, the conception of her daughter, strokes, orgasms, religion, murdering her sister's fish, writing, illness, socks and infidelity. I've read all of them. She is funny, she is harsh, she is fearless. She is endlessly curious, and directs her fine and devastating eye on the mystery of herself.

A pair of poems.

Primitive
by Sharon Olds

I have heard about the civilized,
the marriages run on talk, elegant and
honest, rational. But you and I are
savages. You come in with a bag,
hold it out to me in silence.
I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it
and understand the message: I have
pleased you greatly last night. We sit
quietly, side by side, to eat,
the long pancakes dangling and spilling,
fragrant sauce dripping out,
and glance at each other askance, wordless,
the corners of our eyes clear as spear points
laid along the sill to show
a friend sits with a friend here.

 - from Satan Says, 1980

Stag's Leap
by Sharon Olds

Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine
looks like my husband, casting himself off a
cliff in his fervor to get free of me.
His fur is rough and cozy, his face
placid, tranced, ruminant,
the bough of each furculum reaches back
to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up
and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic,
unwieldy. He bears its bony tray
level as he soars from the precipice edge,
dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart
leaps up. Even when it's I who am escaped from,
I am half on the side of the leaver. It's so quiet,
and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape,
a ground without a figure. Sauve
qui peut--let those who can save themselves
save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone
tiny being crucified
on a fallow deer's antlers. I feel like his victim,
and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched
legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he
throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his
faithfulness, as if it was
a compliment, rather than a state
of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he
feel he had to walk around
carrying my books on his head like a stack of
posture volumes, or the rack of horns
hung where a hunter washes the venison
down with the sauvignon? Oh leap,
leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old
vow have to wish him happiness
in his new life, even sexual
joy? I fear so, at first, when I still
can't tell us apart. Below his shaggy
belly, in the distance, lie the even dots
of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots
clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their
blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans.

 - from Stag's Leap, 2012

the wellspring: poems, by sharon olds

My introduction to Sharon Olds' poetry was in May of 1995, when her poem "January, Daughter" appeared in the New Yorker. One of my favorite professors had just had her first child, and I clipped the poem out of the magazine to give to her. The spare intimacy of it was striking. She is the most physical of poets - her work is sharp and uncluttered, but will move you so powerfully into the realm of an idea or belief that you feel it in your body. I have all of her books of poetry, and choosing this particular one to recommend is really mostly random. I'm basing my choice on the fact that I wanted to use a specific poem here, and it's in The Wellspring. Like a lot of Olds' work, it's both funny and devastating; it feels light, but you'll notice it hanging around later on.

Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil
by Sharon Olds

In the strange quiet, I realize
there's no on else in the house. No bucktooth
mouth pulls at stainless-steel teat, no
hairy mammal runs on a treadmill--
Charlie is dead, the last of our children's half-children.
When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-
mogrified backwards from a living body
into a bolt of rodent bread
she turned her back on early motherhood
and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,
Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,
buried on the old farm we bought
where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it
and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and
needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,
she will not adopt again though she cannot
have children yet, her body like a blueprint
of the understructure for a woman's body,
so now everything stops for a while,
now I must wait many years
to hear in this house again the faint
powerful calls of a young animal.