Once by Sharon Olds
Once
Sharon OldsI saw my father naked, once, I
opened the blue bathroom door
which he always locked — if it opened, it was empty —
and there, surrounded by the glistening turquoise
tile, sitting on the toilet, was my father,
all of him, and all of him
was skin. In an instant my gaze ran
in a single, swerving, unimpeded
swoop, up: toe, ankle,
knee, hip, rib, nape,
shoulder, elbow, wrist, knuckle,
my father. He looked so unprotected,
so seamless, and shy, like a girl on a toilet,
and even though I knew he was sitting
to shit, there was no shame in that
but even a human peace. He looked up,
I said Sorry, backed out, shut the door
but I’d seen him, my father a shorn lamb,
my father a cloud in the blue sky
of the blue bathroom, my eye had driven
up the hairpin mountain road of the
naked male, I had turned a corner
and found his flank ungarded — gentle
bulge of the hip-joint, border of the pelvic cradle.
MARGINALIA
Ah, but I found this little gem today which has been hiding in my shelf for years.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, published by Alfred A.Knopf, 1999. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“WINNER OF THE PATERSON POETRY PRIZE • A transcendent collection of poems about the ecstatic and brutal side of a woman’s experience—from the Pulitzer Prize and T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner, called “a poet for these times, a powerful woman who won’t back down” (San Francisco Chronicle).” (Source)
ABOUT SHARON OLDS
Born in San Francisco on November 19, 1942, Sharon Olds earned a BA at Stanford University in 1964 and a PhD at Columbia University in 1972. Olds’s first collection of poems, Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her following collection, The Dead & the Living (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), was the Lamont Poetry Selection in 1983 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other… (more)
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ENDNOTES
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