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Edited on Sat May-03-08 05:35 PM by BlueIris
"The Source"
It became the deep Spring of my life,
I didn't know if it was sickness or a gift.
To reach around both sides of a man,
one palm to one buttock,
the other palm to the other, the way we are split,
to grasp that band of muscle on the male
haunch and help guide the massed
heavy nerve down my throat until it
stoppers the hole behind the breastbone that is always hungry,
then I feel complete. To be lifted
onto a man—the male breast
so hard, there some no chambers in it, it is
lifting-muscle—and set tight as a lock-slot down
onto a bolt, we are looking into
each other's eyes as if the matter of the iris were
a membrane deep in the body dissolving now,
it is what I had dreamed, to meet men
fully, as a woman twin, unborn
half-gelled, clasped, nothing between us
but our bodies, naked, and when those dissolve,
nothing between us—or perhaps I vanish
and the man is still there, as if I have been trying
to disappear, into them,
to be myself the glass of sourmash
my father lifted to his mouth. Ah, I am in him,
I slide all the way down to the beginning, the
curved chamber of the balls. My brothers
and sisters are there, swimming by the cinerous
millions, I say to them, Stay here—
for the children of this father it may be the better life;
but they cannot hear. Blind, deaf,
armless, brainless, they plunge forward,
driven, desperate to enter the other, to
die in her, and wake. For a moment,
after we wake, we are without desire—
five, ten, twenty seconds of
pure calm, as if each one of us is whole.
—Sharon Olds
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