Sex Without Love

by Sharon Olds

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
Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was, in her own words, raised as a "hellfire Calvinist." After graduating from Stanford she moved east to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University.

Olds is the author of seven volumes of poetry. Her first collection, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award.

Olds's second volume of poetry, The Dead and the Living (1984), won the Lamont Poetry Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Critics praised these poems for their power and their language as they unflinchingly explored sexual abuse and linked it with overt political oppression. The Gold Cell (1987) and The Father (1992) followed.

In Olds's latest book The Wellspring many of these same themes return but the speaker of these poems is often older recalling her youth as in "Necking"and "Adolescence" or reflecting upon her grown children as in "My Son, The Man." Lucy McDiarmid writing for the New York Times hailed this book for its vision: "Like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression."

Olds is an Associate Professor at New York University. She conducts a number of workshops across the country including at The Omega Institute, The Squaw Valley Writers Workshop, and the In the Wilderness program. She also helped found NYU's creative writing program for the physically disabled at Goldwater Hospital in New York City.

The End

We decided to have the abortion, became
killers together. The period that came
changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple
who had been for life.
As we talked of it in bed, the crash
was not a surprise. We went to the window,
looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming
curved shears of glass as if we had
done it. Cops pulled the bodies out
Bloody as births from the small, smoking
aperture of the door, laid them
on the hill, covered them with blankets that soaked
through. Blood
began to pour
down my legs into my slippers. I stood
where I was until they shot the bound
form into the black hole
of the ambulance and stood the other one
up, a bandage covering its head,
stained where the eyes had been.
The next morning I had to kneel
an hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,
rubbing with wet cloths at those glittering
translucent spots, as one has to soak
a long time to deglaze the pan
when the feast is over.