January 23: Another Sharon Olds Poem, Stanley Kunitz, "Stanley Kunitz Ode"

The poem from Best American Poetry 2014 is by Sharon Olds.  I know what you're thinking:  "Another Sharon Olds poem?!"

The reason I chose this poem tonight is that I heard Sharon read a draft of it in California seven or eight years ago.  I was taking a week-long poetry workshop from Sharon in Big Sur.  Every morning and every night, I got to sit in a room with Sharon Olds and talk about poetry.  It seems like a dream now.  Like it never happened.  Every once in a while though, I come across reminders that it really happened.

When I read the poem below, I had a clear memory of sitting with Sharon one afternoon.  She took out her spiral notebook, and she started reading this beautiful tribute to her friend, the poet Stanley Kunitz.  It was so moving.  When she was done reading, she closed her notebook and said, "I have to run this one by Stanley."

Saint Marty did not dream that.

Stanley Kunitz Ode

by:  Sharon Olds

Ninety-five years before he died,
Stanley found an abandoned kitten
in the woods of Worcester.  Stanley's father
had drunk Drano in a public park, while
Stanley had still been turning, a nebula
slowly taking human form
inside his mother.  And when he found
the lost cat, he took it home
and gave it a box in the attic, under
the stars where his father was wheeling, and he raised
his feline companion--I don't know girl
or boy--without his mother much noticing,
hard as she worked, silent as she kept.
And his pet grew, and when they got to the woods he would
take off the collar and leash and they would
frolic together, she-he/he-she would
teach Stanley, already sinuous,
to slink and hunt.  And I don't know who it
was who suddenly saw that Stanley's
companion, growing stronger and bigger and
lither, was a bobcat, and none of us
was there the night Stanley released her-him
or there when it rose in him, the desire
to seek a feline of his own species.
And when he was 98, and Elise
had gone ahead, leaving her words and
images behind her, casting the skin of them,
I saw, in city in Ohio, an elegant
shaving-brush-soft replica bobcat,
and brought it back to West 12th, along with the
usual chocolates, and flowers, and a demo of my
latest progress toward a model's sashay on the catwalk.
And after that, when I'd come over, in those
outfits I wore then, Diana-ing
for a man, Stanley would be holding the stuffed
animal, and petting it,
nape to rump, nape to rump,
stub of the bob tail--98,
99, 100, those huge old beautiful
hands, stroking the world, which hummed when Stanley stroked it.

Stanley's hands