Sharon Olds, from "Little Things"; Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002
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If I pass a mirror, I turn away,
I do not want to look at her,
And she does not want to be seen.
—Sharon Olds, excerpt of "Known to be Left", in Stag's Leap
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patrick white the vivisector \\ sharon olds one secret thing: poems: "something is happening" (via @flowerytale)
kofi
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Sex Without Love
by Sharon Olds
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health — just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
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I know where you are / with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other / with huge invisible threads,
Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002; from ‘True Love’
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Once you lose someone, it is never exactly the same person who comes back.
Sharon Olds
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I Go Back to May 1937, Sharon Olds
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Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back
Sharon Olds; Satan Says
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Sharon Olds, from "Something Is Happening", One Secret Thing: Poems
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—my old love for him, like a songbird's rib cage picked clean.
—Sharon Olds, excerpt of "Years Later", in Stag's Leap
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How sorely I wanted to be
sane. What a life we are given! Sudden,
and cold, with blood on it.
— Sharon Olds, from "Paper Doll Ballad, for Fats," Balladz
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