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All week, we talked. We talked
in the morning on the porch, when I combed my hair
and flung the comb-hair out into the air,
and it floated, down the slope, toward the valley.
We talked while walking to the car, talked
over its mild, belled roof
while opening the doors, then ducked down
and there we were, bent toward the interior, talking.
Meeting, in the middle of the day,
equals--same birthplace, same age, same height--
we opened our mouths. All day,
we sang to each other the level music
of spoken language. Even while we ate
we did not pause, I'd speak to him
through the broken body of the butter cookie,
gently spraying him with crumbs. We talked
and walked, we leaned against the opposite sides of the
car and talked in the parking lot
until everyone had driven off, we clung to its
cold maroon raft and started a new subject.
We did not talk about his wife, much,
or my husband, but to everything else
we turned the workings of our lips and tongues
--up to our necks in the hot tub,
or walking, up the steep road,
stepping into the hot dust as if
down into the ions of a wing, and on the
sand, next to each other, as we turned
the turns that upon each other would be the
turnings of joy-- even under
water there trailed from our mouths the delicate
chains of our sentences. But mostly at night, and
far into the night, we talked until we
dropped, as if, stopping for an instant, we might
move right toward each other. Today,
he said he felt he could talk to me forever,
it must be the way the angels live,
sitting across from each other, deep
in the bliss of their shared spirit. My God,
they are not going to touch each other.
From Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, copyright 1999 by Sharon
Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf.
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