Stag's Leap (6 page)

    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

lower, down into those mineral regions—I would

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 willingness 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.

    Left-Wife Bop

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 air 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.

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.