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drawn as if on a barge resting on

  updrafts, mild downdrops, he is like

  an icon, he is like a fantasy.

  I did not know him, I knew my idea

  of him. The first years alone,

  they said I would get over him

  sometime soon, and the skin of my heart

  seemed to be lying along the skin

  of some naked heart. But now the invisible

  streams show themselves, in their motions

  of him, in the low empyrean

  above the playground—look, he is out

  there, casting his narrow shadow

  over the faces in the carriages

  in the park, and I am in here! I do not let

  go of him yet, but hold the string

  and watch my idea of him pull away

  and stay, and pull away, my silver kite.

  Red Sea

  And at a party, or in any crowd, years

  after he has left, there will come an almost

  visible image of my ex, appearing

  at the far side of a room, moving

  toward me, making his way between people,

  as the soul used to make its way, through

  clothes, until it lay, bare,

  beside the soul of the beloved, then they seemed

  to swim into each other, and they sang. Before me,

  on either side, facing each other

  like opposing armies, two columns

  of words keen and catcall to each other:

  relinquishment, fastening,

  abjure, trice up;

  forfeiture, colligate,

  disclaim, padlock;

  free, ligate,

  abandon, yoke,

  desert, surcingle,

  secede, belay;

  quit, solder,

  yield, snood,

  leave, enchain,

  release, bind;

  clinch,

  latchet,

  suture,

  peg;

  splice,

  wattle,

  harness,

  nail,

  much work to be done. And Love said, to me,

  What if I, myself, asked you

  to love him less. And I stepped out into

  the trough between the pillars, the dry

  ground through the midst of the sea—the waters

  a wall unto me, on the right hand,

  and on the left.

  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 wi
llingness 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 ai
r 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.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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.

  ALSO BY SHARON OLDS

  One Secret Thing

  Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980–2002

  The Unswept Room

  Blood, Tin, Straw

  The Wellspring

  The Father

  The Gold Cell

  The Dead and the Living

  Satan Says