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the worst thing<br />
/Stag’s Leap, 2012.<br />
One side of the highway, the waterless hills.<br />
The other, in the distance, the tidal wastes,<br />
estuaries, bay, throat<br />
of the ocean. I had not put it into<br />
words, yet—the worst thing,<br />
but I thought that I could say it, if I said it<br />
word by word. My friend was driving,<br />
sea–level, coastal hills, valley,<br />
foothills, mountains—the slope, for both,<br />
of our earliest years. I had been saying<br />
that it hardly mattered to me now, the pain,<br />
what I minded was—say there was<br />
a god—of love—and I’d given—I had meant<br />
to give—my life—to it—and I<br />
had failed, well I could just suffer for that—<br />
but what, if I,<br />
had harmed, love? I howled this out,<br />
and on my glasses the salt water pooled, almost<br />
sweet to me, then, because it was named,<br />
the worst thing—and once it was named,<br />
I knew there was no god, there were only<br />
people. And my friend reached over,<br />
to where my fists clutched each other,<br />
and the back of his hand rubbed them, a second,<br />
with clumsiness, with the courtesy<br />
of no eros, the homemade kindness.<br />
Salto <strong>del</strong> Ciervo / Sharon Olds / Traducción de Natalia Leiderman y Patricio Foglia<br />
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