Quotes from Sharon Olds

I recognize the fog in the air, the shining of her dark hair that curls around a finger like a night wood shaving, I know her thrill and fear of being observed

next to some people something walks, like a starveling, sometimes for a lifetime.

I have eaten brains, my tongue loves to probe the delicate folds

My mother never wanted me to die. They were broken, in her, some of the mechanisms of helping others to thrive—she did not want me to thrive more than she did, or as much as she did, she had to triumph, but she wanted me to breathe, even to sing, and my heart to beat, without a quaver

I want to gather the unaccented beats... and thank them, give them treats, whatever a feminine ending eats

Are you as happy as you thought you'd be , I ask. Yes. And his smile is touchingly pleased. I thought you'd look happier , I say, but after all, when I am looking at you, you're with me!

I never thought to see you again, I never thought to seek you.

and it's as if my body has not heard, or hasn't believed, the news

I did not know I hated—I did not know there was meanness in me, and permanent dysforgiveness and scorn.

But then I brought the shards back together above the dash, I drew in the web of the spider-line cracks... and he fell to the earth, and slept on the grass

And suddenly I see I do write poems in sentences—not broken into lines, but wound around the caesura, making a caduceus.

The X of respects, and the boxing ring's KO, and the menstrual text—my father said, in Kotex code, I break the hex, I brek-a-kex-kex, I bless your art, I bless your sex.

Then every scene I thought of I visited accompanied by a death-spirit, everything was chilled with it, each time I woke, I lay in dreading bliss to feel and hear him sigh and snore.

Now I come to look at love in a new way, now that I know I'm not standing in its light.

In me now there's a being of sheer hate, like an angel of hate.

in the body's mouth-to-mouth full-out duet

But look! I am starting to give him up! I believe he is not coming back. Something has died, inside me, believing that

in a sky whose darkness is fading, that first dream, from which I am now waking.

The other dreams inside a constellation

and some young men loved them the way one would want, oneself, to be loved.

All was in place— the fitted box of the planet, the tiered sewing-table town.

Last thing, at dusk, I leaned out the hotel window, like a seal sticking halfway out of the concave comber it is riding.

Along the runway, wind poured through the coat of horsetail fur, and terns, in their skirts, fluttered above the thumbnail and crochet-hook snails, and we knock-swashed up, excreting fumes of carbon fern and marrow—and in the seat pocket, in front of me, were crimped, furled buds, stems bushy with fresh thorns, and her last flagon of perfume, its glass dove alighting to seize it...

God-bye, for the rest of this life and for the long nothing.