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Classic and Contemporary Poetry
CHAMBER THICKET, by SHARON OLDS Poet Analysis Poet's Biography First Line: As we sat at the feet of the string quartet | |||
As we sat at the feet of the string quartet, in their living room, on a winter night, through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent air was thick-alive with pearwood, ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse howled, and cat skreeled, and then, when the Grosse Fugue was around us, under us, over us, in us, I felt I was hearing the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening and grieving and scathing, along each other, scraping and craving, I felt myself held in that woods of hating longing, and I knew and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents, there -- and then, at a distance, I sensed, as if it were thirty years ago, a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching, straying toward, and then not toward, and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted to warn him away, to call out to him to go back whence he came, into some calmer life, but his beauty was too moving to me, and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the covert, any more, and so I prayed him come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome. Copyright (c) 2001 by The Modern Poetry Association. This poem appears in the August 2001 issue of Poetry Magazine. http://www.poetrymagazine.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...IN A LECTURE-ROOM by ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH FONTENOY by THOMAS OSBORNE DAVIS POETA FIT, NON NASCITUR by CHARLES LUTWIDGE DODGSON THE YARN OF THE 'NANCY BELL' by WILLIAM SCHWENCK GILBERT TO MICHAL: SONNETS AFTER MARRIAGE: 8. AFTER RONSARD by CHARLES WILLIAMS THE WOOD THRUSH by SUSAN SHARP ADAMS BETWEEN SLEEP AND WAKING by MATHILDE BLIND |
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