Skip to content

Brick
PO Box 609, Stn P
Toronto, ON M5S 2Y4
Canada

416-593-9684
[email protected]

  • Ontario Creates
  • Ontario Arts Council
  • Canada Council for the Arts

I’d Ask Him for It

From Brick 87

Brick 87
Rarely, my ex would sing to me,
I don’t know what scale he used, maybe Arab,
seventeen steps to the octave, or Chinese,
five. It was microtonal a-
harmonic, its staff was of the bass clef,
but I don’t know how far below baritone
it went, C below middle C or
lower, down into those mineral regions—I would
ask it of him directly, I would be
lying along him, and would say to him,
softly, confiding, “Do me some low notes,” and he’d
open his wide, thin-lipped, tone-deaf
Cupid’s-bow mouth, and seek down
for a breath near the early deposited shales,
he would make the male soundings, and if I had been
finishing I would again, deep
level bubble of a whole note slowly
bursting. I think he loved being loved,
I think those were the cadences,
plagal, of a good, lived life.
He liked it a long time, tonic,
dominant, subdominant, and now
I want to relearn the intervals, to
journey with a man among the thirds and fifths,
augmented, diminished, with a light touch,
sforzando, rallentando, agitato, the usual
adores and dotes—and of course what I really
want is some low notes.

Sharon Olds teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Program in Creative Writing at New York University. Her next book, called Odes, hopes to be out September 2016.

More Articles

Read from Brick 90

Read from Brick 90