ENG 332: Poetry & How I Sees it

So the way I see poetry working is like this, it's a bunch of words strung together in a way that when we read it, the reading of the words themselves is an experience, a little trip down the rabbit hole of language. I don't in any way, think myself a poet but I can friggin' try my hand at it nonetheless. Make up words, make up worlds, disguise a dirty, dark secret into a quaint lil poem about flowers and rainbows. lol. Sharon Olds has a pretty good handle on that, even though after reading enough of her stuff, you come to realize she had major daddy issues but that's not the point. The point is, she wrote in way, that you sit there, and read the words, and let them slid over your eyes, let them take you to someplace else, someplace made by her own words, and experience the poem.


POEM
The Promise

by Sharon Olds
With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out,
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid
I’ll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains
bound at the waist—and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.