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Chamber Thicket

By Sharon Olds b. 1942 Sharon Olds

As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,

in their living room, on a winter night,

through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps

and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent

air was thick-alive with pearwood,

ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse

howled, and cat skreeled, and then,

when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us,

over us, in us, I felt I was hearing

the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening

and grieving and scathing, along each other,

scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that

woods of hating longing, and I knew

and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents,

there—and then, at a distance, I sensed,

as if it were thirty years ago,

a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching,

straying toward, and then not toward,

and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming

herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted

to warn him away, to call out to him

to go back whence he came, into some calmer life,

but his beauty was too moving to me,

and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the

covert, any more, and so I prayed him

come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.

Source: Poetry (August 2001).

Biography

Sharon Olds is one of contemporary poetry’s leading voices. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Olds is known for writing intensely personal, emotionally scathing poetry which graphically depicts family life as well as global political events. “Sharon Olds is enormously self-aware,” wrote David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement. “Her poetry is . . .

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