CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Sharon Olds
Title Page
January–December
While He Told Me
Unspeakable
The Flurry
Material Ode
Telling My Mother
Silence, with Two Texts
Gramercy
The Last Hour
Last Look
Stag’s Leap
Known to Be Left
Object Loss
Poem for the Breasts
Winter
Not Going to Him
Pain I Did Not
The Worst Thing
Frontis Nulla Fides
On the Hearth of the Broken Home
Love
The Healers
Left-Wife Goose
Something That Keeps
The Easel
Approaching Godthåb
Spring
Once in a While I Gave Up
To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now
French Bra
My Son’s Father’s Smile
Not Quiet Enough
Summer
Sea-Level Elegy
Sleekit Cowrin’
Tiny Siren
Attempted Banquet
Fall
The Haircut
Crazy
Discandied
Bruise Ghazal
Years Later
On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult
Maritime
Slowly He Starts
Red Sea
Running into You
I’d Ask Him for It
The Shore
Poem of Thanks
Left-Wife Bop
Years Later
September 2001, New York City
What Left?
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds’ stunningly poignant new sequence of poems, tells the story of a divorce, embracing strands of love, sex, sorrow, memory, and new freedom. In this wise and intimate telling – which carries us through the seasons when her marriage was ending – Sharon Olds opens her heart to the reader, sharing the feeling of invisibility that comes when we are no longer standing in love’s sight; the surprising physical passion that still exists between a couple during parting; the loss of everything from her husband’s smile to the set of his hip.
Olds is naked before us, curious and brave and even generous toward the man who was her mate for thirty years and now loves another woman. As she writes in the remarkable title poem, ‘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’.
Olds’ propulsive poetic line and the magic of her imagery are as lively as ever, and there is a new range to the music – sometimes headlong, sometimes contemplative and deep. Her unsparing approach to both pain and love makes this one of the finest, most powerful books of poetry Olds has yet given us.
About the Author
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford and Columbia universities. 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 shortlisted 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 is one of the founders of NYU’s writing workshops for residents of Goldwater Hospital, and for veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
STAG’S LEAP
January–December
WHILE HE TOLD ME
While he told me, I looked from small thing
to small thing, in our room, the face
of the bedside clock, the sepia postcard
of a woman bending down to a lily.
Later, when we took off our clothes, I saw
his deep navel, and the cindery lichen
skin between the male breasts, and from
outside the shower curtain’s terrible membrane
I called out something like flirting to him,
and he smiled. Before I turned out the light,
he touched my face, then turned away,
then the dark. Then every scene I thought of
I visited accompanied by a death-spirit,
everything was chilled with it,
each time I woke, I lay in dreading
bliss to feel and hear him sigh
and snore. Near sunrise, behind overcast, he got
up to go in and read on the couch,
as he often did,
and in a while I followed him,
as I often had,
and snoozed on him, while he read, and he laid
an arm across my back. When I opened
my eyes, I saw two tulips stretched
away from each other extreme in the old
vase with the grotto carved out of a hill
and a person in it, underground,
praying, my imagined shepherd in make-believe paradise.
UNSPEAKABLE
Now I come to look at love
in a new way, now that I know I’m not
standing in its light. I want to ask my
almost-no-longer husband what it’s like to not
love, but he does not want to talk about it,
he wants a stillness at the end of it.
And sometimes I feel as if, already,
I am not here – to stand in his thirty-year
sight, and not in love’s sight,
I feel an invisibility
like a neutron in a cloud chamber buried in a mile-long
accelerator, where what cannot
be seen is inferred by what the visible
does. After the alarm goes off,
I stroke him, my hand feels like a singer
who sings along him, as if it is
his flesh that’s singing, in its full range,
tenor of the higher vertebrae,
baritone, bass, contrabass.
I want to say to him, now, What
was it like, to love me – when you looked at me,
what did you see? When he loved me, I looked
out at the world as if from inside
a profound dwelling, like a burrow, or a well, I’d gaze
up, at noon, and see Orion
shining – when I thought he loved me, when I thought
we were joined not just for breath’s time,
but for the long continuance,
the hard candies of femur and stone,
the fastnesses. He shows no anger,
I show no anger but in flashes of humour,
all is courtesy and horror. And after
the first minute, when I say, Is this about
her, and he says, No, it’s about
you, we do not speak of her.
THE FLURRY
When we talk about when to tell the kids,
we are so together, so concentrated.
I mutter, ‘I feel like a killer.’ ‘I’m
the killer’ – taking my wrist – he says,
holding it. He is sitting on the couch,
the worn indigo chintz around him,
rich as a night tide, with jellies,
I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him
as if within some chamber of matedness,
some dust I carry around me. Tonight,
to breathe its Magellanic field is less
painful, maybe because he is drinking
a wine grown where I was born – fog,
eucalyptus, sempervirens – and I’m
sharing the glass with him. ‘Don’t catch
my cold,’ he says, ‘ – oh that’s right, you want
to catch my cold.’ I should not have told him that,
I tell him I will try to fall out of
love with him, but I feel I will love him
all my life. He says he loves me
as the mother of our children, and new troupes
of tears mount to the acrobat platforms
of my ducts and do their burning leaps,
some of them jump straight sideways, and for a
moment, I imagine a flurry
of tears like a wirra of knives thrown
at a figure to outline it – a heart’s spurt
of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod
to it, it is my hope.
MATERIAL ODE