Poetry Saturdays: Sharon Olds

If you have never read Sharon Olds, do yourself a favor and check out her richly sensuous, blood-and-guts poetry ASAP. A lot of her imagery is intense and graphic, but always lyrical.

Song the Breasts Sing to the Late-In-Life Boyfriend

When you touch them, their skin feels like the surface
of a soap bubble, tensile and shimmering,
the oils of many colors moving
in swirls, like the Coriolis winds of the globe.
When you hold them, it feels as if, within each,
there’s a solar system, majestic, lawful,
playful. When you hold one in your grip, a moment –
gently, but not sentimentally, and
shake it, there starts to snow a flurry
in my chest and belly, and lower belly,
where the flakes settle and sparkle. And when you
touch their centers, the tips of my ears grow
points, when your fingers nip their centers in the
bud, the blood flowers of engorgement
blossom. I like that you like that one of the
stem-stubs will sometimes draw inside, into
its hill, like an ostrich bloom which blooms,
lover of the dark, down into the ground.
When you hold them I feel like plunder adored
which adores being plundered. The mouths of your hands
honor the food of my flesh in its season,
and if it were reasonable to thank you
for doing what you like, I would thank you within reason,
but as it is not, I thank you beyond reason.