All of those things, I believe, can have an impact, maybe bring a little light into a dark world.
Sharon Olds meditates on the difference sex makes in the world . . .
Know-Nothing
by: Sharon Olds
Sometimes I think I know nothing about sex.
All that I thought I was going to know,
that I did not know, I still do not know.
I think about this out of town,
on hotel elevators crowded with men.
The body of knowledge which lay somewhere
ahead of me, now I do not know where it
lies, or in the beds of strangers.
I know of sexual love, with my beloved,
but of men—I think there are women who know
men, I can’t see what it is
they know, but I feel in myself that I
could know it, or could I have been a woman who
would dare that. I don’t mean what she does
with herself, or that she would know more pleasure,
but she knows something true that I don’t know,
she knows fucking with a stranger. I feel
in awe of that, why is she not
afraid, what if she did not like
his touch, or what he said, how
would she bear it? Or maybe she has mercy on pretty much
anything a stranger would say or do,
or maybe it is not mercy, but sex,
when she sees what he’s like, she enflames for that,
and is afraid of nothing, wanting to touch
stone desire, and know it, she is like
a god, who could have sex with stranger
after stranger—she could know men.
But what of her womb, tender core
of her being, what of her breasts’ stiff hearts,
and her dense eggs, what if she falls
in love? Maybe to know sex fully
one has to risk being destroyed by it.
Maybe only ruin could take
its full measure, as death stands
in the balance with birth, and ignorance with love.
To know sex fully, you have to risk being destroyed by it. I think to know anything fully, you have to risk being destroyed by it.
For instance, I studied poetry in my MFA program. As an undergraduate, I studied computer science and math. I was good at calculus and programming. I got A’s in all my classes (except for a bowling class—don’t open up that old wound!). Yet, at the end of my fourth year of undergraduate study, the prospect of spending my life coding and debugging programs seemed like a death sentence. I knew it would have destroyed me. So, I made a switch.
I think I was a shitty teacher when I first started standing in front of students and pretending I was some kind of expert. (I ate, drank, and slept with imposter syndrome.) I think I’ve learned a few things in the three intervening decades. Now, I would say I’m a pretty damn in a classroom. But those first few courses I taught nearly destroyed me.
And I kind of stumbled into poetry. My life goal was to be the next Stephen King. Fiction was where it was at. Sure, I read poetry and loved poetry, but I never fancied myself the next Robert Frost of Sharon Olds. I wanted to write horror and make a boatload of cash. You can all tell how that turned out for me. As Neruda writes in his poem “Poetry”: “ . . . Poetry arrived / in search of me, I don’t know, I don’t know where / it came from . . .”
That’s a pretty accurate description of the arrival of poetry in my life. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing the first few poetry workshops I took, and I had one poetry instructor, in particular, who told me I didn’t know what the hell I was doing (which caused an almost year-long battle with writer’s block). Poetry destroyed my dream of being a zillionaire horror novelist, but, at that point in my life, I really didn’t care.
You see, as you get older, things that seemed really important earlier in life tend to evaporate like an ice cube at the equator. Priorities shift. Here is now my definition of a successful day: everyone is healthy; no nuclear or biological weapons have been used on the planet; and, somewhere during the past 24 hours, I made the world a little bit kinder and gentler.
And if being kinder and gentler almost destroys me, so be it.
Saint Marty wrote a poem about kindness, sort of, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
In 1793, Marie Antionette was beheaded two and half weeks before her thirty-eighth birthday during the French Revolution. Write a poem that imagine a parade of Marie Antionettes or another famous French figure walking down a street in the city of Pairs, Wisconsin (population 754),
Let Them Eat Cake
by: Martin Achatz
She never said that, was the victim
of bad press and urban myth,
like the one about mixing Pop Rocks
and Coke or turning out all the lights
and saying Bloody Mary three times
in front of a mirror. In fact, the last
thing she said as she climbed
to the guillotine was Pardon me, sir.
I did not do it on purpose after she stepped
on her executioner’s toes, words
that I hope clotted his heart until,
years later, he dropped dead while
feeding his chickens one morning, the ghost
of the young queen greeting him
on the other side, a plate in her hands
holding a piece of lemon chiffon cake
with buttercream frosting the color of pearl.
Nice picture!
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