Stag’s Leap: Poems
I was first attracted to this selection of poems because it won the Pulitzer Prize this year, and for good reason! I’m so glad I picked this book up. I have no first, or really even second hand experience with divorce, but I was very moved by Olds’ poetry. Her selection of poems are so raw, powerful, and vivid. There were many poems in the book that I was completely drawn into and I felt the anguish she had experienced. I was impressed with the courage it must have taken for Olds’ to expose herself and her marriage so completely to readers.
From Stag’s Leap:
‘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 humor,
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.
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