Odes by Sharon Olds

Author:Sharon Olds [Olds, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

SPLIT ODE

for Chase Twichell

Thinking of you this morning, the day

after your operation, it is

as if you are in two places

at once – the first place is you,

and the second place is where what had been

in you lies, what they lifted out,

and set aside. In my sleep I saw it

on a gurney, womb and fallopian tubes

like the ceremonial mask of a deer

or like a violet lyre, being rushed

to where our entrails are read. The chrome

tray flashed under the ceiling lights,

in it both chamois purses,

full at your birth, now spent – and attached

to each of them something like a waxing

predator moon. I woke, and sank back, and you were

lying on a desk, like a fancy deckled

scalloped stationery envelope,

and a letter was being pulled out,

and put back and pulled out like those tabs in children’s

pop-up books, and the letter said isthmus,

infundibulum, fimbria.

And then, you were a map, of a pale

golden color, and something like

the Louisiana Purchase, of a blue-

violet color, was in you, and then gone –

first in you, then drifted home, to another

continent. I turned onto my back,

and my ventral surface was a dress pattern

and the dotted lines were stitches made

of flame. And at first light I dreamed you were

spirit; and what had been removed from you

was matter. And at dawn, in your hospital bed, there was

a big deck of 53

cards, and the doctors slipped one out –

an extra, red queen, and then there were

many, little decks on the sheet

around the mother deck – maybe 30

decks of 52 weeks each,

and all of them had a yin and yang

on the back of them, every woman

jack of them.

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