Free Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds Page B

this would happen,
    I thought it would be a pure horror,
    but it’s just home, Mom’s house
    and garden, earth, olive and willow,
    beech, orchid, and the paperweight
    dusted with opal, inside it the arms of a
    nebula raking its heavens with a soft screaming.
    Â Â Â Â Silence, with Two Texts
    When we lived together, the silence in the home
    was denser than the silence would be
    after he left. Before, the silence
    was like a large commotion of industry
    at a distance, like the downroar of mining. When he went,
    I studied my once-husband’s silence like an almost
    holy thing, the call of a newborn born
    mute. Text: “Though its presence is detected
    by the absence of what it negates, silence
    possesses a power which presages fear
    for those in its midst. Unseen, unheard,
    unfathomable, silence dis-
    concerts because it conceals.” Text:
    â€œThe waters compassed me about, even to
    the soul: the depth closed me round
    about, the weeds were wrapped about
    my head.” I lived alongside him, in his hush
    and reserve, sometimes I teased him, calling his
    abstracted mask his Alligator Look,
    seeking how to accept him as
    he was, under the law that he could not
    speak—and when I shrieked against the law
    he shrinked down into its absolute,
    he rose from its departure gate.
    And he seemed almost like a hero, to me,
    living, as I was, under the law
    that I could not see the one I had chosen
    but only consort with him as a being
    fixed as an element, almost
    ideal, no envy or meanness. In the last
    weeks, by day we moved through the tearing
    apart, along its length, of the union,
    and by night silence lay down with blindness,
    and sang, and saw.
    Â Â Â Â The Last Hour
    Suddenly, the last hour
    before he took me to the airport, he stood up,
    bumping the table, and took a step
    toward me, and like a figure in an early
    science fiction movie he leaned
    forward and down, and opened an arm,
    knocking my breast, and he tried to take some
    hold of me, I stood and we stumbled,
    and then we stood, around our core, his
    hoarse cry of awe, at the center,
    at the end, of our life. Quickly, then,
    the worst was over, I could comfort him,
    holding his heart in place from the back
    and smoothing it from the front, his own
    life continuing, and what had
    bound him, around his heart—and bound him
    to me—now lying on and around us,
    sea-water, rust, light, shards,
    the little eternal curls of eros
    beaten out straight.
    Â Â Â Â Last Look
    In the last minute of our marriage, I looked into
    his eyes. All that day until then, I had been
    comforting him, for the shock he was in
    at his pain—the act of leaving me
    took him back, to his own early
    losses. But now it was time to go beyond
    comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,
    still, like the first ocean, wherein
    the blue-green algae came into their early
    language, his sea-wide iris still
    essential, for me, with the depths in which
    our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,
    on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland
    nectar of our milk—
our
milk. In his gaze,
    rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-
    emerald; driven, dirty-rice snow:
    he was in there somewhere, I looked for him,
    and he gave me the gift, he let me in,
    knowing he would never once, in this world or in
    any other, have to do it again,
    and I saw him, not as he really was, I was
    still without the strength of anger, but I
    saw him see me, even now
    that dropping down into trust’s affection
    in his gaze, and I held it, some seconds, quiet,
    and I said, Good-bye, and he said, Good-bye,
    and I closed my eyes, and rose up out of the
    passenger seat in a spiral like someone
    coming up out of a car gone off a
    bridge into deep water. And two and
    three Septembers later, and even
    the September after that, that September in New York,
    I was glad I had looked at him. And when I
    told a friend how glad I’d been,
    she said,
Maybe it’s