Solis

I originally posted this poem on September 7, and it was lost in the subsequent server crash. My thanks to the indefatigable chip for having saved it.

A sort of tribute to a woman's quiet realization.

I do not know what he sees, but I see
eyes of surpassing tenderness
and calm, a calm like the dignity
of matter. I love the open ocean
blue-grey-green of his iris, I love
the curve of it against the white,
that curve the sight of what has caused me
to come, when he's quite still, deep
inside me. I have never seen a curve
like that, except the earth from outer
space. I don't know where he got
his kindness without self-regard,
almost without self, and yet
he chose one woman, instead of the others.

By knowing him, I get to know
the purity of the animal
which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing,
his entire face lit. I love to see it change if I cry -- there is no worry,
no pity, no graver radiance. If we
are on our backs, side by side,
with our faces turned fully to face each other,
I can hear a tear from my lower eye
hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth,
and then the upper eye's tears braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow
like the invention of farming, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.

I am so lucky that I can know him.
This is the only way to know him.
I am the only one who knows him.

Excerpted from "The Knowing," published in Blood, Tin, Straw (1999). Olds is an academic (a professor at NYU), poet laureate of the State of New York, and a widely published poet. She's been described as a "gifted and startling poet of the body."