daily poem: The Promise / Sharon Olds

Having a rather bad day today, trying to focus on the positive in the spirit of TiLT, but feeling a little overwhelmed by a recent spate of personal disappointments and bad news. However it's only Day Two of The Portmanteau's Poetry Month and I don't want to fall behind already...so here's a poem from Sharon Olds for the moment. I was hoping to focus on Olds in today's poet profile too, but I think I'll keep that for next week when I have more time to do her justice. In the meantime I'm planning to get a profile post on Elizabeth Bishop (who I can write about more easily, having studied her in some depth as an undergrad) and some audio up tonight. Here's 'The Promise', which I adore, in fact I'm completely head-over-heels for Sharon Olds, no one writes about love and sex with such tenderness and richness and lyricism as she does...


The Promise
Sharon Olds

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.


From Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002. Buy it here.

Photo by koinis.