Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds

January–December
    Â Â Â Â 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 curtain’s 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.
    Â Â Â Â 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.
    Â Â Â Â The Flurry
    When we talk about when to tell the kids,
    we are so together, so concentrated.
    I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “
I’m
    the killer”—taking my wrist—he 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 born—fog,
    eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m
    sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch
    my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s 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 it—a heart’s spurt
    of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod
    to it, it is my hope.
    Â Â Â Â Material Ode
    O tulle, O taffeta, O grosgrain—
    I call upon you now,