I was striving for it, within the gift of it

When I look up Venus’s eros-cone of a skirt, 

like looking up my own skirt— 

when I look up Venus, she is on the same 

page as the cunning bivalve of 

the flytrap, she is held in the fine 

thousand layers, the mille-feuille of the 

dictionary’s petticoats—I find she was named 

for love—for desire, its base ‘to strive for,’ 

‘to attain.’ And suddenly I see I do 

write poems in sentences—not broken into 

lines, but wound around the caesura, 

making a caduceus. And I see that desire, 

for me, is bound up with the idea of the eternal. 

I heard, in church, about ecstasy,

which seemed to lie outside dimension

and duration. And when I began to have sex-in-

love, it did not seem like something

I was doing—thought it was—it seemed like something which was

happening to me, though I was striving

for it, within the gift of it.

And did I ever make love with anyone

I did not think I would be with all

my life? I don't think so. Sex was where forever

touched me, and I touched it—and where everywhere

burst, slowly, in me. It was the one

time in which we seemed safe from loss,

from parting, the hour when we seemed to step

outside time and space and everything—

outside our deaths, and the price of it was nowhere, and nothing.

[Sharon Olds {1942- } 'Sex with Love', from Arias]