Men kissing, men kissing men in a movie,
women kissing, kissing women in the next,
then men kissing women, then women, men,
lips swelling into sexual pout,
tongues like petals in storm whorling
on a screen in the basement
of the Methodist Church. Not porn, not instruction
but an ancient lesson — adoration,
how the mouth without words is made holy.
In the diner after the movies, men kissing,
a blonde and a redhead. Over rhubarb pie and coffee
I’m imagining the redhead kissing me.
“The idea of writing saving you as you’re going through something I don't believe in at all.”
From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.
Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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