Self-Exam
They tell you it won’t make much sense, at first, you will have to learn the terrain. They tell you this at thirty, and fifty, and some are late beginners, at last lying down and walking the old earth of the breasts—the small, cobbled, plowed field of one, with a listening walking, and then the other— fingertip-stepping, divining, north to south, east to west, sectioning the little fallen hills, sweeping for mines. And the matter feels primordial, unimaginable—dense, cystic, phthistic, each breast like the innards of a cell, its contents shifting and changing, streambed gravel under walking feet, it seems almost unpicturable, not immemorial, but nearly un- memorizable, but one marches, slowly, through grave or fatal danger, or no danger, one feels around in the two tack-room drawers, ribs and knots like leather bridles and plaited harnesses and bits and reins, one runs one’s hands through the mortal tackle in a jumble, in the dark, indoors. Outside— night, in which these glossy ones were ridden to a froth of starlight, bareback. Sharon Olds