Thursday Short Poem: Olds' "First Sex"

Regular readers ought to know that I was raised with broad tastes in poetry.  Throughout my childhood -- and even now -- my mother read aloud to my brother and me.  I grew up on everything from Millay to Jeffers to  Milosz to Tennyson to Adrienne Rich to W.H. Auden; I later developed my own passions for modern poets as diverse as W.S. Merwin, Nikki Giovanni and Ana Castillo.  My mother and I discovered poets together (like Szymborska and Kooser), and she still suggests occasional Thursday Short Poems.

In college I remember deciding that in the end, there were only two fundamentally interesting subjects to me: sex and God.  Two decades on, I suppose I still feel that way; it certainly explains my academic background in medieval ecclesiastical history and contemporary gender studies.  And as a lover of poetry too shy to display his own work, it's not surprising that the Divine and the Erotic are two regular themes in the poems I select.  Today's poem, by the well-known Berkeley poet Sharon Olds, falls into this latter category.

Some of my poetry choices are rare and obscure, some are commonly known -- today's poem likely falls into the latter category.  No living American writer "writes the body" in all of its gorgeous, hot, messy, fragile gloriousness than does Olds.  Though love and experience teach one a great deal about Eros, and prayer and Scripture teach one a great deal about God, sometimes only poetry can lead me to a basic, fundamental truth about either.   

The first time I read this poem, I said "Uh huh, that's right.  That's so very right." I won't say more than that.  (Yes, it's from a woman's perspective, and I'm a heterosexual man, but no male writer I've ever read captures sexuality as well as Olds does.)

First Sex

(for J.)

I knew little, and what I knew
I did not believe – they had lied to me
so many times, so I just took it as it
came, his naked body on the sheet,
the tiny hairs curling on his legs like
fine, gold shells, his sex
harder and harder under my palm
and yet not hard as a rock his face cocked
back as if in terror, the sweat
jumping out of his pores like sudden
trails from the tiny snails when his knees
locked with little clicks and under my
hand he gathered and shook and the actual
flood like milk came out of his body, I
saw it glow on his belly, all they had
said and more, I rubbed it into my
hands like lotion, I signed on for the duration.

Comments

[Mermade]

Oh my... I... am too close to this poem that I don't know what to say. Whoa.

[Hugo]

Olds will do that to ya. Go out and buy her stuff; start with ""The Dead and the Living" or "The Gold Cell".

[JesC]

I've had the opposite timeline in life. I spent much of my youth being chaste, happily admitting my virginity, and "not having fun." But through many discussions recently with trusted friends, a few memories have resurfaced of the actual programming I received from my church on the virtues of saying no. They used some pretty underhanded tactics, mainly stories based on fear and withholding information. There was also blantant authorial intimidation "say no, 'cause we say so," and they fed it to us when we were so very young and easily manipulated.

I bought it for a long time, but now that I've remembered those "sermons" more clearly and can look at them with my 27 years of experience and education, I can see them for the nasty brainwashing that they were. Now I have decided to break away from the institution that lied to me so many times and caused in me a level of f***ed-upness about sex that robbed me of years that I could have been enjoying very healthy sex, of a man who I still love deeply, and it seems likely of thousands of dollars I'm going to need to spend on therapy.

My church failed me miserably on the issue of sex, and from what I can see now, not much has changed.

[Mermade]

Thanks, Hugo! I'll totally check out more of her work!

On a side note, I read in my Marriage and Family textbook that the women who reported to having an orgasm every single time they had sex were... married conservative Protestants.

I don't agree with every aspect of how my church approached sex. At the same time, however, (and I speak for myself - nobody else), I think that there's something to said for the traditional, Christian approach to sexuality.

[Lindsey]

That's an amazing poem. Thanks for posting it.

[Mermade]

I went out and bought, "The Dead and the Living" yesterday - thanks so much for recommending it!

[Hugo]

Good, Mermade!  Once you're done with that, get "The Gold Cell."

Want a punch in the gut?  From "Dead and the Living", read "My Father Snoring" and "For My Daughter." 

I've had other Olds poems up before.  Heck, I've had more of hers up in the past two-plus years than any other poet:

Connoisseuse of Slugs, the very famous Sex Without Love, Forty-One, Alone, No Gerbil, The Abandoned Newborn, and California Swimming Pool.

I don't think I've had any other poet up more than four times...

[Michelle]

Does anyone know Old's poem about the orange peel? She speaks of the spritz of the juice from the peel on her lover's skin in it. I can't remember the title, and it's driving me completely mad.

[Hugo]

Michelle, you mean "Liddy's Orange" from the Gold Cell.

[Michelle]

Thanks!!

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