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Edited on Sat Nov-24-07 11:37 AM by BlueIris
"In the Cell"
Sitting in the car at the end of summer, my
feet on the dashboard, the children in the back
laughing, my calf gleaming like a crescent moon,
I notice the hairs are sparser on my legs,
thinning out as I approach middle age—
not like some youth whose vigorous hairs
pulse out of his skin with power while he is
taking a man's genitals off as
slowly as possible, carefully, so as
not to let him get away, to
get all he knows out of him first—
names, locations, human maps of
human cities, in our common tongue and
written with our usual alphabet so he can
rule those maps, change the names of the streets and
line the people along them to turn the
small cells of their faces up to him,
the sun on him like gilding.
This is what I cannot understand, the
innocence of his own body, its
goodness and health, the hairs like sweet
molasses pouring from the follicles of his forearm and
cooling in great looping curls
above the sex of the man he is undoing
as he himself was made.
—Sharon Olds
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