You can't say I didn't warn you.
When It Comes
Sharon Olds
it’s lovely when it comes, and it’s a sexual loveliness,
right along that radiant throat
and lips, the first hem of it,
and at times, the last steps across the bathroom,
you make a dazzling trail, the petals
the flower-girl scatters under the feet of the bride. And then the colours of it,
sometimes an almost golden red,
or a black vermilion, the drop that leaps
and opens slowly in the water, gel
sac of a galaxy,
the black-violet, lobed pool, calm
as a lake on the back of the moon, it is all
woundless, even the little spot
in jet and crimson spangled tights who
flings her fine tightrope out
to the left and to the right in that luminous arena,
green upper air of the toilet bowl,
she cannot die. There will be an egg in there,
somewhere, minute, winged with massive
uneven pennons of serum, cell that up
close is a huge, sodden, pocked planet,
but it was not anyone yet. Sometimes,
when I watch the delicate show,
like watching snow, or falling stars,
I think of men, what could it seem to them
that we see the blood pour slowly fom our sex,
as if the earth sighed, slightly,
and we felt it, and saw it,
as if life moaned a little, in wonder, and we were it.
There's a lot of griping and sniping about Sharon Olds online. She is famous enough that she made a recent Most Overrated Writers List, which makes a lot of bellyaching only to be expected. I don't want to go into that.
She's been accused of being lazy, derivative, boring, shrill, repetitive, facile, pointless. This poem is none of those things. It's such a gorgeous piece, amazing images spilling out in waves of... well, you know.
It's almost like a late Romantic ode, but the object of nature which drives the poet to frenzied heights is menstruation. It's exhilarating and dangerous and somehow has the ring of truth to me, even though I wouldn't - indeed, by definition, cannot - know the first thing about it.
This is what contemporary American poetry is always promising to give us: no taboos, no subject off-limits, no codified tradition or rules from on high telling you what or how to write.
Mostly, this antinomianism degenerates into navel-gazing and pointlessness, as good anarchists tend to. But sometimes it makes good. I'm simultaneously disgusted, amazed, appalled and exultant. I don't read enough that makes me feel this way, and I'm none the better for it.
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