I posted this last year - let me re-post is because this poem keeps going round and round my brain. I hit the treadmill, and that's what comes up. I still don't know what she means, and I still enjoy the pondering:
Sex Without Love
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
_____Sharon Olds
[found in the plagiarist poetry archive]
I'm not sure what to think of this, and what she is trying to say. I guess I'll ponder this for a while.
First I thought she was pitying "the ones who make love without love". Then she says they "are the true religious, the purists, the pros" ... is she admiring them, wishing she was one of them? Or is she being sarcastic? And I read the comments on the plagiarist site, and I am amazed at the very different conclusions people come up with - and how convinced they seem they got it right.
Me, I am forever in doubt. But I would much rather keep asking questions than come up with an answer and be done.
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