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19
When we took the acid, his wife was off
with someone else, there was a hole in their bedroom
wall where the Steuben wedding owl
had flown from one room right into another,
I was in love with his best friend, who had
gone into a monastery
after he'd deflowered me, so we
knew each other — when he came, under
my palm I could feel the circular ribs of his
penis, I came with my legs wrapped around his
leg, even with my toes pointed, my
feet reached only halfway down
his calf, later I was lying on the bathroom
floor, looking up at him, naked, he was
6'6", a decathlete,
my eyes followed the inner curve of his
leg, up, up, up,
up, up, up, up.
Weeks later, he would pull a wall-phone
out of a wall, and part of the wall, the
wires like deseeded vesicle; he would
cross the divider in his Mustang with me and go
60, against 2 a.m. traffic, crying, I could
hardly hear what he said about the barbed
wire and his father and his balls — but that
acid night, we stayed up all night, I was
not in love with him, so his beauty made me
happy, we chattered, we chatted naked, he
told me everything he liked
about my body — and he liked everything —
even the tiny gooseflesh bumps
around my hard nipples,
he said the way to make love to me
would be from behind, with that long angle, his
forefinger drew it, gently, the deep
hair-pin curve of the skinny buttocks,
he said it the way I thought an older
cousin in a dream might give advice
to a younger cousin, his fingertip
barely missing my — whatever, in love, one would
call the asshole, he regarded me with a
savoring kindness, from some cleft of sweetness in the
human he actually looked at me
and thought how I best should be fucked. Oooh.
Oooh . . . It meant there was something to be done with me,
something exactly right, he looked at me
and saw it,
willing to not be the one
who did it — all night, he desired me and
protected me, he gazed at my body and un-
saw my parents' loathing, pore by
pore on my skin he closed that old couple's eyes.
"19" first appeared in Triquarterly and is reprinted by permission.
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©1999 Sharon Olds and Nerve.com
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