|
The poem
Sex Without Love
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like
ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children
at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the
God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off
their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false
Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are
like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their
over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single
body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
Sharon Olds
|
