Sex Without Sharon Olds

Imagine sex without Sharon Olds doing
a number beyond the shadowed
bedroom window. Imagine you
winning a marathon without bona
fide running shoes. If it were love
that made these things possible
then I could agree with your
quaintly estranged views. I have

ice-skated only in an involuntary
sense, the experience that survived
was an intense ‘falling down’. Waking
wet with an aching head taught me
more of caution than joy; I can’t see
that sex entwined in an ice-dance
analogy was the epitome of such
grandiloquence in our lovers’ antics.

Have run marathons though. The love
is as pure as she says. No-one could run
for the love of the love of the love of it
except within the bounds of a sanctioned
insanity – no-one would say that they did
but for the love of the love of it. And in the
same way I see sex without Sharon Olds
languished in an alienated misogyny.
© 10 May 2007, I.D. Carswell