salto del ciervo

sunday in
the empty nest
/The unswept room, 2002.
Slowly it strikes me how quiet it is.
It’s deserted at our house. There’s no one here,
no one needing anything of us,
and no one will need anything of us
for months. No one will walk into the bedroom
and ask for something. I feel like someone
abandoned-- taken somewhere, and left,
some kind of resort, there’s nothing for us to do
for anyone, everything is easy.
Maybe we’re dead, maybe this
is heaven. After the hour in love’s bed, and then
sleeping a little, we half wake
and I look, into your eyes, or into
the inner white of one eye
while the lovely lids do their wide-horizon
basking jerk, I find I can go
inhuman watching that—the single nearsimultaneous
dip and rise—I forget
the word for eyes and the concept of eyes, I just
look , an animal looking into the
liquid inside the other’s head,
or through a tapered peephole into
the diorama of another dimension,
cloud, sky, pelagic water, the
Sea of Eden, I am looking deep
across it, as if without knowledge, without use.
Salto del Ciervo / Sharon Olds / Traducción de Natalia Leiderman y Patricio Foglia
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