Olds - Stags leap

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF Copyright 2012 by Sharon Olds All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Cover image: The Stags' Leap design is a registered trademark of Treasury Wine Estates.

Used with permission. Cover design by Chip Kidd Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olds, Sharon.
Stags leap / by Sharon Olds.1st ed.
p. cm.
Poems.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95991-1
I.Title.
PS 3565. L 34 S 732012
811.54dc23 2012004426 v3.1

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, where some of the poems in this book first appeared. Poetry: The Flurry The New Yorker: Stags Leap, Silence, with Two Texts, On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult Poetry London: Bruise Ghazal, Sleekit Cowrin Southern Review: Slowly He Starts, The Healers TriQuarterly: To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now, Sea-Level Elegy Slate: Pain I Did Not Green Mountain Review: Something That Keeps The Atlantic Monthly: September 2001, New York City The American Poetry Review: While He Told Me, Last Look, Material Ode, Years Later, What Left?, The Worst Thing Five Points: Unspeakable Tracking the Storm: Object Loss Brick: Id Ask Him for It Gulf Coast: Left-Wife Goose Threepenny Review: Discandied Ploughshares: Poem for the Breasts Ontario Review: Known to Be Left Tin House: On the Hearth of the Broken Home This books title, with its singular stag, is a play on the name of the winery Stags Leap. 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. 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 curtains 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 Im not standing in its light.

I want to ask my almost-no-longer husband what its 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 hereto stand in his thirty-year sight, and not in loves 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 thats 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 mewhen 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, Id gaze up, at noon, and see Orion shiningwhen I thought he loved me, when I thought we were joined not just for breaths 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 humor, all is courtesy and horror. And after the first minute, when I say, Is this about her, and he says, No, its 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. Im the killertaking my wristhe 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 bornfog, eucalyptus, sempervirensand Im sharing the glass with him.

Dont catch my cold, he says, oh thats 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 ita hearts spurt of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod to it, it is my hope. Material Ode O tulle, O taffeta, O grosgrain I call upon you now, girls, of fabrics and the woman I sing. My husband had said he was probably going to leave menot for sure, but likely, maybeand no, it did not have to do with her.

O satin, O sateen, O velvet, O fucking velveeta the day of the doctors dress-up dance, the annual folderol, the lace, the net, he said it would be hard for her to see me there, dancing with him, would I mind not going. And since Id been for thirty years enarming him, I enarmed him furtherArma,Virumque, sackcloth, ashen embroidery! As he put on his tux, I saw his slight smirk into the mirror, as he did his bow tie, but after more than three decades, you have some affection for each others little faults, and it suited me to cherish the belief no meanness could happen between us. Fifty fifty we had made the marriage, fifty-fifty its demise. And when he came home and shed his skin, Reader, I slept with him, thinking it meant he was back, his body was speaking for him, and as it spoke, its familiar sang from the floor, the old-boy tie. O silk, O slub, O cocoon stolen. It is something our species does, isnt it, we take what we can.

Or else thered be grubs who kept people, in rooms, to produce placentas for the larvaes use, there would be a cow who would draw from our wombs our unborn offspring, to make of them shoes for a calf. O bunny-pajamas of children! Love where loved. O babies flannel sleeper with a slice of cherry pie on it. Love only where loved! O newborn suit with a smiling worm over the heart, it is forbidden to love where we are not loved. Gramercy The last time we slept together and then I cant remember when it was, I used to be a clock of sleeping together, and now it drifts, in me, somewhere, the knowledge, in one of those washes on maps of deserts, those spacious wastesthe last time, he paused, at some rest stop, some interval between the unrollings, he put his palm on my back, between the shoulder blades. It was as if he were suing for peace, asking if this could be overmaybe not just this time, but over.