Unspeakable
Now I come to look at
love
in a new way, now that
I know I'm not
standing in its light.
I want to ask my
almost-no-longer
husband what it's like to not
love, but he does not
want to talk about it,
he wants a stillness
at the end of it.
And sometimes I feel
as if, already,
I am not here - to
stand in his thirty-year
sight, and not in
love's sight,
I feel an invisibility
like a neutron in a
cloud chamber buried in a mile-long
accelerator, where
what cannot
be seen is inferred by
what the visible
does. After the alarm
goes off,
I stroke him, my hand
feels like a singer
who sings along him,
as if it is
his flesh that's
singing, in its full range,
tenor of the higher
vertebrae,
baritone, bass,
contrabass.
I want to say to him,
now, What
was it like, to love
me - when you looked at me,
what did you see? When
he loved me, I looked
out at the world as if
from inside
a profound dwelling,
like a burrow, or a well, I'd gaze
up, at noon, and see
Orion
shining - when I
thought he loved me, when I thought
we were joined not
just for breath's time,
but for the long
continuance,
the hard candies of
femur and stone,
the fastnesses. He
shows no anger,
I show no anger but in
flashes of humour
all is courtesy and
horror. And after
the first minute, when
I say, Is this about
her, and he says, No,
it's about
you,
we do not speak of her.
from Stag's Leap, by Sharon Olds, who has won the TS Eliot Poetry Prize
