35/10 by Sharon Olds
Brushing out my daughter’s dark
silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a small
pale flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old
story-the oldest we have on our planet-
the story of replacement.
- from The Dead and The Living (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.) copyright Sharon Olds
that book, The Dead and The Living, was really important to me about 8 years ago or so. wonder how it’d feel now? should see if i can scare it up off my bookshelf.
thanks for posting.
Rauan,
about five or six years ago, I loved this book. As I was looking through it for my “friday poem”, I started to notice that I wasn’t enjoying the book like I once had – in fact, it was hard for me to find a poem I felt was worthy of posting. BUT! I did – and it’s pretty perfect (for me) right now. I wish the book as a whole still resonated like it once did, but it doesn’t.
And hey, thanks for stopping by.
I wonder if Sylvia Plath would have continued on the same path… as Sharon Olds seems to have done? The ‘risk’ is all on the side of personal exposure, very little on the side of language, form, aesthetic strategy.
I found one of her first books on a shelf in a bookstore… read every poem standing there in the aisle, first to last. I wonder now what it was that made that first encounter so exciting? Now, I can’t read even one of those poems. Like thinking about myself 40 years ago, flinching at the arrogance, the blind unjustified self-assertion… I want to believe we can overcome that, grow through and past it… I want to find a new book by Olds, pick it up… and find myself as excited as I was with her first book… and relieved… that yes, it is possible… we can… maybe even…me … to begin again, and again