"How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love?"
Sharon Olds starts her poem with a very mundane question and proceeds to answer it in the next 23 lines not using symbols but inspired irony. She writes poetry about something that lost its poetry. In our society sex and love became almost independent of each other. "How do they do it...." Not that I dare give an answer to this question but I see how in our modern society we are more disconnected from our own emotional selves, the vicious circles continuing from generation to generation. Romance became over-rated. Sex became just another activity. Olds using interesting similes associating sex with endurance sports such as running. I love her play with contrasts. The emotional is cold as ice and the physical is hot and sweaty.
"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."
Olds uses a beautiful simile at the beginning of this stanza, the lovers looking like dancers, gracious and beautiful. However she ends on a different note comparing their faces with those ones of the unwanted babies resulted from the loveless union. "Beautiful as dancers" is indeed a sarcastic remark.
The ending of the poem is a sad conclusion. They are alone. They are missing on an important emotional and spiritual connection furthering away from the truth, from the essence.
The ending of the poem is a sad conclusion. They are alone. They are missing on an important emotional and spiritual connection furthering away from the truth, from the essence.
"they know they are alone
(...)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."
