I THINK EMILY DICKINSON
WOULD HAVE BEEN POLITICAL TODAY
by Sharon Olds
Page 13
I find her also such a passionate love poet. So I wanted to read a love poem in her honor. It's called "After Making Love, Winter":
At first, I cannot have even a sheet on me,
anything at all is painful, a plate of
iron on my nerves, I lie there in the air,
as if flying rapidly without moving,
and slowly I cool off--hot,
warm, cool, cold, icy, till the
skin all over my body is icy
except at those points our bodies touch
like plumes of fire. Around the door,
loose in its frame, and and around the transom,
the light from the the hall burns in lines
and casts up narrow beams on the ceiling like a
figure throwing up its arms for joy.
In the mirror, the angles of the room are calm,
it is the hour when you can see that the angle itself is blessed,
The dark globes of the chandlier,
suspended in the mirror, are motionless.
I can feel my ovaries deep in my body. I gaze at the silvery bowls.
Maybe I am
looking at my ovaries, it is
clear everything I look at is good and real
and good. We have come to the end of questions,
you run your palm, warm, large, dry, back along my face
over and over, over and over, like God
putting the finishing touches on, before
sending me down to be born.
"Adolescence"
When I think of my adolescence, I think
of the bathroom of those seedy hotels
in San Francisco, where my boyfriend took me.
I had never seen bathrooms like that--
no curtains, no towels, no mirror, just
a sink green with grime and a toilet
yellow and black--like something in a science experiment,
growing the plague in bowls.
Sex was still a crime, then,
I'd sign out of my college dorm
to a false destination, sign into
the flophouse under a false name,
go down the hall to the one bathroom
and lock myself in. And I could not learn to get that
diaphragm in, I'd decorate it
like a cake, with glistening spermicide,
and lean down, and it would leap from my fingers
and sail into a corner, to land
in a concave depression like a rat's nest,
I'd bend and pluck it out and wash it
and wash it down to that fragile dome,
I'd frost it again till it was shimmering
and bend it into its little arc and it would
fly through the air, rim humming
like Saturn's ring, I would bow down and crawl to retrieve it.
When I think of being nineteen
that's what I see, that delicate disc
floating through the air and descending, I see myself
kneeling and reaching, reaching for my life.
