A Poem For Sunday

“Pain I Did Not” by Sharon Olds:

When my husband left, there was pain I did not

feel, which those who lose the one

who loves them feel. I was not driven

against the grate of a mortal life, but

just the slowly shut gate

of preference. At times I envied them—

what I saw as the honorable suffering

of one who is thrown against that iron

grille. I think he had come, in private, to

feel he was dying, with me, and if

he had what it took to rip his way out, with his

teeth, then he could be born. And so he went

into another world—this

world, where I do not see or hear him—

and my job is to eat the whole car

of my anger, part by part, some parts

ground down to steel-dust. I like best

the cloth seats, blue-grey, first

car we bought together, long since

marked with the scrubbed stains—drool,

tears, ice cream, no wounds, but only

the month’s blood of release, and the letting

go when the water broke.

(From Stag’s Leap: Poems by Sharon Olds © 2012 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Flickr user Thomas)