1
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother with a few light books at her hipstanding at the pillar made of tiny bricks with thewrought-iron gate still open behind her, itssword-tips black in the May air, they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they areinnocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it--she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do thingsyou cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children, you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to goup to them there in the late May sunlight and say it, her hungry pretty blank face turning to me, her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me, his pitiful beautiful untouched body, but I don't do it. I want to live. Itake them up like the male and femalepaper dolls and bang them togetherat the hips like chips of flint as if tostrike sparks from them, I say Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it .Sharon Olds
2
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.Sharon Olds
3
A family is a mystery.Sharon Olds
4
Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.Sharon Olds
5
...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.Sharon Olds
6
The Knowing Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise- comaed and woken, we lie a long time looking at each other. I do not know what he sees, but I see eyes of surpassing tenderness and calm, a calm like the dignity of matter. I love the open ocean blue-grey-green of his iris, I love the curve of it against the white, that curve the sight of what has caused me to come, when he’s quite still, deep inside me. I have never seen a curve like that, except the earth from outer space. I don’t know where he got his kindness without self-regard, almost without self, and yet he chose one woman, instead of the others. By knowing him, I get to know the purity of the animal which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing, his entire face lit. I love to see it change if I cry—there is no worry, no pity, no graver radiance. If we are on our backs, side by side, with our faces turned fully to face each other, I can hear a tear from my lower eye hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth, and then the upper eye’s tears braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow like the invention of farmimg, irrigation, a non-nomadic people. I am so lucky that I can know him. This is the only way to know him. I am the only one who knows him. When I wake again, he is still looking at me, as if he is eternal. For an hour we wake and doze, and slowly I know that though we are sated, though we are hardly touching, this is the coming the other coming brought us to the edge of—we are entering, deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze, this place beyond the other places, beyond the body itself, we are making love.Sharon Olds
7
Each hour is a room of shame, and I amswimming, swimming, holding my head up, smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed, like being naked with the clothed, or beinga child, having to try to behavewhile hating the terms of your life.Sharon Olds
8
I've said that he and I had been crazyfor each other. But maybe my ex and I were notcrazy for each other. Maybe wewere sane for each other, as if our desirewas almost not even personal -it was personal, but that hardly mattered, since thereseemed to be no other womanor man in the world.Sharon Olds