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.
I suppose the reason this poem is a thrill for me each time I read it is that I still can't figure out whether Olds really means what I think she means. Is "the single body alone in the universe" really "the truth"? Is there nothing, not even sex fueled by romantic love, which can bring us a satisfying connection with another mind? Is there no such thing as 'understanding'? These people who are able to have sex without love, have they unwittingly discovered a truth of which so many others are ignorant, that anything we experience we experience completely alone? I find that notion rather frightening, because really, the layers of our human loneliness, when peeled away, can be rather terrifying if not framed in the correct manner. And one reading suggests that yes, that is what Olds is saying. But another reading could show Olds as a fascinated observer of these non-loving lovers, a sociologist of sorts who postulates that such a phenomenon (sex without love) hints at a deeper truth in which she herself doesn't actually believe. But I dunno...what do you think? It is lovely, no?
