Sometimes in the evening I see
coming toward me, from a distance,
a kind of blossom: huge, blue, nodding
against this flat continent, taking
the fields away, and changing
irreversibly as the leaves
go by into that visible surface,
the dark, which takes me up,
again, still unprepared among
the lamplight of this year’s
perpetual turn. As if my
saying so made any difference,
this is, I assume you know, still
too close to you. Which doesn’t
matter. And yet, if it were
anything else, like an elliptical
conversation, or a question of a loon
lifting off an empty tree,
or the room simply gathering
shadows in its usual fashion
and dispersing the dull light
—it would have meant the same.
As though I were standing,
inevitably, at the edge of a secret
place that begins overflowing
its stones, in a way I could only
describe. But you can almost
hear me say it, this is the room
where I live. That same weakness.
Which tells you something
about yourself. And before I sleep.
as always, I raise myself up
on one elbow and pour water
into a glass, and the dozen acacias
are bleeding on the pond again, which
I can see from the window, the pond
that so often thinks of itself
in human terms, as you’ll remember,
on nights like these—or as a fire
around which sullen, disgruntled men
have gathered now that even the moon
has come out and confessed:
but I want to love you with both my hands.
Now that the landscape, like an
unwritten page, is occupied with so many
other details of pain—like the smoke,
coiling there so gracelessly,
the black smoke no one will talk about.
Sharon Olds
The I is Made of Paper
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica Laser. Olds also reads three of her poems: “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” (issue no. 74, Fall–Winter 1978), “True Love,” and “The Easel.”
This episode was produced and sound-designed by John DeLore. The audio recording of “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” is courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
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