It's the end of May, and graduates are moving out into the world, for good or for ill, so I thought I would post one of my favorite poems by Sharon Olds. I'm sure that the group has read her work before, but here's her bio.

Born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds earned a B.A. at Stanford University and a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Her first collection of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Olds's following collection, The Dead & the Living (1983), received the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her other collections include Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (2004, Knopf), The Unswept Room (2002), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), and The Father (1992), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.


I GO BACK TO MAY 1937
by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Oddly enough I think I have only read this once before, and yet it is the poem I think of whenever I think of Sharon Olds. (For the record my parents got along very well, so it must have been the contrast that got my attention.)

This is such a poignant poem. I have read it before, but it's nice to read it again. I often think of it when looking at old photographs.

It's definitely one that strikes something deep inside of me. I love the images of the gate -- I have my photo posed in front of the gate at my alma mater. Pretty universal probably. My daughters have been given some old photos over the past year -- first, I took each of them a stack of old photos of them and of myself a while back, then they each got a CD copy of the images Jim copied for their grandfather's photo album given to him on his 90th birthday and then a CD of images culled from the same sources showing themselves -- individually, together and with friends and family members - a life montage of sorts. My daughters have both latched onto a photo of me with my head slightly tillted down eating a creamsicle which was taken at the San Diego Zoo during the "honeymoon" week when Jim and I entertained his father, garndfather and brother by giving them the Southern California tourist tour -- for some reason it is suddently their "favorite" picture of me. I wonder if they see that younger image similarly to those paper dolls Olds speaks of here.

Old photos tell quite a story certainly.

Quite the poem, thank you.

My wife and I graduated from college at 2 pm on a lovely Saturday in May (1975) and were married that evening. So that allusion in the poem resonates. But I don't think our child would even imagine asking us not to have come together. Yes, we were kids and we were dumb but we had enough dumb luck to be right.

I love this poem. Thanks for posting it. That last line sums up Olds' poetry for me.

Pamela, someone once said when I read faulkner I must immediately wash it down wwith Hemmingway, though it may have been vice-versa. Anyway, I have always chased this Olds poem with Outdoor Shower, from Blood, Tin, Straw, so I can be rereminded of her four dimensionality.

Outdoor Shower

Crusted with dried brack, dusted with
sand, shaking from the cold Atlantic,
hair gristled with crystals, tangled with the
jellied palps of wrack -- just step on this
slatted rack, pull the iron
handle of the forged world toward you.
The sluice courses, down your shin,
in a swirling motion, milk smoke, the
silky rush of fresh water, supple and alkaline.
Lids clenched, you reach for the small
oil torso of soap, run it
along your limbs and whirl it over the points of the
three-point shower star of sex:
arm-put, arm-pit, sex. Then the gritty
dial of your face, lather it, bring it
under the coursing, and open your mouth,
stone-sweet well-water,
and then the head,
delve it in so the sand around the scalp
dances like the ions at the edges of matter,
and the shampoo, mild soldier,
take her by the shoulders and pour the pale eel on your head. Then
feel them going:
salp, chitin, diatom, dulse, the
blind ones of the ocean. Rinse until
it pours down your head like water, the dark
descendant pelf of the land. Now open your eyes --
green lawn, silver pond,
grey dune, blue Atlantic,
the simple fields of God, liquid and solid.
Turn and turn in hot water,
column of heat in the cool wind
and sunny air, squeeze your eyes and then
open them again -- look, it is still there,
the world as in heaven, your body at the edge of it.


We've had both I Go Back to May 1937, and Outdoor Shower as contributions for past weekly poems.

Thanks Ruth for maw from Straw.

My favorite Line:

"but I don't do it. I want to live."

Despite the pain we may feel in life, we don't want to be a part of the unborn. Even the most difficult life is better than no life.

I miss you.. your friend Ahavah