Coming of Age

In high school--about six or seven years ago, I guess--I discovered a poet named Sharon Olds. She immediately became one of my favorites. At the time I was writing a lot of poetry myself and I identified with her style a bit. I also loved what she wrote about--gritty subjects, shameful behavior, like the time she poured bleach into her sister's goldfish bowl just to see what it would do to the fish. She wrote about things that I was still too embarrassed to talk about even in the poems that I would never show anyone....

The poem below is my favorite of hers, and is one of my five or so favorite poems ever. It's 2008 now, not 1966, but coming of age still feels the same for me in a lot of ways. And with my upcoming trip to Vietnam--now only 16 days away--I identify more than ever with the young girl speaking in the poem.


Coming of Age 1966
Sharon Olds

When I came to sex in full, not sex
by fits and starts, but day and night,
when I lived with him, I thought I'd go crazy
with shock and awe. In Latin class
my jaw would drop when I would remember
the night, the morning, the in the out the
in, the long torso of the beloved
lowered lifted lowered. When he wasn't
there, when he worked 36 On,
8 Off, 36 On, 8 Off,
I'd sit myself down to memorize Latin
so as not to go mad--my brain felt like a
planet gone oval, wobbling out of
orbit, pulling toward a new ellipsis,
I learned a year of Latin in a month,
aced the test, made love, wept, when he was
working all night I'd believe that a burglar might
actually be climbing the wall outside my window,
palm to the stone rosette, toe on the
granite frond, like the prowler who'd scaled the first
storey next door, been peeled from the wall
and kicked in the head. And every time
I tried to write a love poem,
giving the lovers their flesh on the page,
the child with her clothes burned off by napalm
ran into the poem screaming. I was
a Wasp child of the suburbs, I felt
cheated by Lyndon Johnson, robbed of my
entrance into the erotic, my birthright
of ease and joy. I understood
almost nothing of the world, but I knew that I was
connected to the girl running, her arms
out to the sides, like a plucked heron, I was
responsible for her, and helpless to reach her,
like the man on the sidewalk, his arms up
around his head, and all I did
was memorize Latin, and make love, and sometimes
march, my heart aching with righteousness.