sex without love
I can barely write in my own journals these days before shutting the cover and finding another distraction.
I don't know if I'm afraid of writing honestly or that it's just been so long I've forgotten how. I want to get back to that place where I can write freely, without being self-conscious or weary of who's reading.
It's been a month of endings, many endings and a few beginnings. I don't know where to begin in describing my emotions within all of them.
Last night I joined my mother and three other great writers in attending an intimate evening with Sharon Olds, and we listened to one of the most unguarded, sensualist, raw female poets whose writing has ever crossed my path.
Long strands of soft grey hair pouring around her face, Olds chanted about breasts, periods, a violent childhood and a husband who left her. Men and women in the crowd thanked her for breaking down the walls that stopped them from speaking about the body and everything else that is beautiful and taboo.
"If that's not inspiration for being honest," I said after the show, "then I don't know what is."
Sex Without Love
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
Gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth, whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
-- Sharon Olds
I don't know if I'm afraid of writing honestly or that it's just been so long I've forgotten how. I want to get back to that place where I can write freely, without being self-conscious or weary of who's reading.
It's been a month of endings, many endings and a few beginnings. I don't know where to begin in describing my emotions within all of them.
Last night I joined my mother and three other great writers in attending an intimate evening with Sharon Olds, and we listened to one of the most unguarded, sensualist, raw female poets whose writing has ever crossed my path.
Long strands of soft grey hair pouring around her face, Olds chanted about breasts, periods, a violent childhood and a husband who left her. Men and women in the crowd thanked her for breaking down the walls that stopped them from speaking about the body and everything else that is beautiful and taboo.
"If that's not inspiration for being honest," I said after the show, "then I don't know what is."
Sex Without Love
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
Gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth, whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
-- Sharon Olds
posted by Gillian Young at 11:00 AM
2 Comments:
That's a beautiful poem!! How much and how little admiration I have for people who have sex without love. As if I knew it all, as if I knew nothing at the same time. I loved this post, very thought provoking.
Keep writing, even if honesty feels awkward sometimes just don't bottle up.
You are a fabulous writer, and I love reading your work and your take on the world around you.
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