True Love by Sharon Olds
True Love
Sharon OldsIn the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I hobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.
MARGINALIA
“You don’t always have to be so brave, you know.”
“Oh but I do, actually.”
KEEP READING
SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002 by Sharon Olds, published by Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“From the Pulitzer Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry winner comes a powerful collection from one of our most gifted and widely read poets—117 of her finest poems drawn from her seven published volumes.” (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)
Read more poems by Sharon Olds • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Website • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
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