Because I felt too weak to move

you kindly moved for me, kneeling

and turning, until you could take my breast-tip in the

socket of your lips; and my womb went down

on itself, drew sharply over and over

to its tightest shape, the way, when newborns

nurse, the fist of the uterus

with each, milk, tug, powerfully

shuts. I saw your hand, near me, your

daily hand, your thumbnail,

the quiet ordinary self, when your mouth at my

breast was drawing sweet gashes of come

up from my womb made black fork-flashes of a

celibate's lust shoot through me. And I couldn't

lift my head, and you swiveled, and came down

close to me, delicate blunt

touch of your hard penis in long

caresses down my face, species

happiness, calm which gleams

with fearless anguished desire. It found

my pouring mouth, the back of my throat,

and the bright wall which opens. It seemed to

take us hours to move the bone

creatures so their gods could be fitted to each other,

and then, at last, home, root

in the earth, wing in the air. As it finished,

it seemed my sex was a grey flower

the color of the brain, smooth and glistening,

a complex calla or iris which you

were creating with the errless digit

of your sex. But then, as it finished again,

one could not speak of a blossom, or the blossom

was stripped away, as if, until

that moment, the cunt had been clothed, still,

in the thinnest garment, and now was bare

or more than bare, silver wet-suit of

matter itself gone, nothing

there but the paradise flay. And then

more, that cannot be told — may be,

but cannot be, things that did not

have to do with me, as if some

wires crossed, and history

or war, or the witches possessed, or the end

of life were happening in me, or as if

I were in a borrowed body, I

knew what I could not know, did — was

done to — what I cannot-do-be-done-to, so when

we returned, I cried, afraid for a moment

I was dead, and had got my wish to come back,

once, and sleep with you, on a summer

afternoon, in an empty house

where no one could hear us.

I lowered the salt breasts of my eyes

to your lips, and you sucked,

then I looked at your face, at its absence of unkindness,

its giving that absence off as a matter

I cannot name, as if I was seeing not

you but something between us, that can live

only between us. I stroked back the hair in

pond and sex rivulets

from your forehead, gently raked it back

along your scalp,

I did not think of my father's hair

in death, those oiled paths, I lay

along your length and did not think how he

did not love me, how he trained me not to be loved.






"You Kindly" will appear in Sharon Olds' forthcoming book Blood, Tin, Straw