My Flight

I wanted to make a drawing on the first plane,
but my tremor was active and the plane was steadily trembling.
I wanted to start with the squared oval of the window,
and the frost which was spreading up the pane in feather shapes –
rachis, barbel, barbicule –
aslant, moving to the east, as we were,
and visible through them the long, grey border of a lake,
and down through the water, shoals of green lakeweed –
the shadows of smoke-color cumulus low over the water.
I had made many mistakes toward the end of the night,
lay down on the floor and fell asleep, late for the taxi,
late to the airport, waited in the wrong line –
and I was one day early for my flight.
But I got to the gate in time, there was one chair left,
and I sat, with everything piled on my lap,
and a kind-looking young man walked up and stood in front of me,
his eyes shining,
his hat soft and black, wide-brimmed, his beard full.
Hello, I said, he looked to me like a rabbi.
He said, I love your work, I have taught you for years,
I want to give you my books, he handed me two books
with gold seals of prizes on them,
I tried to find a book of mine for him and could not,
I had tears in my eyes, I bowed to him,
I sat till they called my row.
He was still seated as I passed, I said I am so touched by your gift.
This is my wife, he said, both of them shining –
I studied with Toi, he said, at Pitt.
I reached my seat, and started to read him.
Mount Hood floated past us on our right.
We rose, and his poems rose and settled deep in me.
I felt safe in the plane, as if I were in the hands of his God
who liked him and whom he liked,
and I followed his words east, and this was my
flight with Ahuva Rachel and Yehoshuah November.

Paper-Doll Ballad, for Fats

I like cutting out paper clothes, I
like getting the tabs right –
2-D attachment, the doll with no choice –
girls like coat-hangers, the mother's right

to order the child half-bared, the lower
the power half.  How sorely I wanted to be
"sane."  What a life we are given!  Sudden,
and cold, with blood on it.  We'd evolved from

ferns and grasses, reptiles, rodents, then
there we were, with our pacifiers, in our
Infant Seats!  What they had, when my mother was a
baby, was a laudanum-soaked

rag.  But I had smuggled in
my thumb, and they did not paint it with iodine
until I was 10.  And those funny feelings,
when I sucked it, if she hadn't been socking me for it, 

I could have caressed myself off to sleep!  
But at scrapbook time, biting with child
scissors along the dotted lines –
an Outfit!  for skating! – I travailed without cease or

fuck to imitate the middle-class Wasp, though
nothing availed to keep a best friend
alive, nothing vailed against punishment,
except, at last, to be so much taller than my

mother that if I had fought her I would have
won. So I kept cutting around
the tabs, fashioning costumes like sandwich
boards to hang onto girls. But when

the music began, all of a sudden,
8th grade, Blueberry Hill,
my body came alive, and moved,
and found its thrill.

Sharon Olds is the author of twelve books of poetry, including most recently Arias (2019), which was short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her 2012 collection Stag’s Leap won both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital, and for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New York City.

photo credit: Marcus Mam, Vogue, September 2012