Sharon Olds’ Old Haunts

(a conversation)

Sharon says, “The light is clever here,” as we scan the NY Times obituaries, offering a count, a coupling there, heroic or lemon-filled, and in the bowers of donut preparation, puff-pastry touched, we single out borrowers of light sorted, of blank neon stares no longer sizzling with cantos of frying oil.

Nothing delights quite like you’d expect it, which is somehow better, more alluring, if the weather holds with a diaeresis’s punch. “Your knuckles are barnacled there, or if I could make a gerund of it, you’d get it instead of your soul being smacked around.” “Dreams as fluffy as ever, Berkeley.”

No sounds behave quite like early mourning sounds. Dead people’s relatives, what they call, “loved ones,” coinciding with the dwindling knowledge of one’s existence. Packaged purpose. Seedy discontent where a spectral mural fails to show through a new paint job. Eyes whose purpose has long faded from sight’s past tense.

“We’re all blurred, I take it.” I do. “Wrote that dissertation hours ago, in my head.” “No place like it.” “Nope.”

The cashier’s got a good thing going, a repartee with the clientele that’s like a hand smoothed across the gristly shoulders of worry. And an abused apron dotted with oil-spatter constellations and isles of runny filling. Pushovers, decent cussers…