A Poem For Friday

“Known to Be Left” by Sharon Olds:

If I pass a mirror, I turn away,

I do not want to look at her,

and she does not want to be seen. Sometimes

I don’t see exactly how to go on doing this.

Often, when I feel that way,

within a few minutes I am crying, remembering

his body, or an area of it,

his backside often, a part of him

just right now to think of, luscious, not too

detailed, and his back turned toward me.

After tears, the chest is less sore,

as if some goddess of humanness

within us has caressed us with a gush of tenderness.

I guess that’s how people go on, without

knowing how. I am so ashamed

before my friends—to be known to be left

by the one who supposedly knew me best,

each hour is a room of shame, and I am

swimming, swimming, holding my head up,

smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,

like being naked with the clothed, or being

a child, having to try to behave

while hating the terms of your life. In me now

there’s a being of sheer hate, like an angel

of hate. On the badminton lawn, she got

her one shot, pure as an arrow,

while through the eyelets of my blouse the no-see-ums

bit the flesh no one seems now

to care to touch. In the mirror, the torso

looks like a pinup hives martyr,

or a cream pitcher speckled with henbit and pussy-paws,

full of the milk of human kindness

and unkindness, and no one is lining up to drink.

But look! I am starting to give him up!

I believe he is not coming back. Something

has died, inside me, believing that,

like the death of a crone in one twin bed

as a child is born in the other. Have faith,

old heart. What is living, anyway,

but dying.

(From Stag’s Leap: Poems by Sharon Olds, copyright © 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 Dave Walker)