go through airports praising people, like an
Antichrist saying, You do not need
to change your life. (57)
Olds is known for going to poetic places where other more angelic types fear to tread, like the joy of sexuality-as if it only belonged on TV, but must get itself to a nunnery in poetic form. Olds mocks this notion immediately in "Breaking Bad Aria," when she imagines why the shifty Heisenberg (Walter White) resonates with men: "he gets sexually aroused by / cooking meth and having / killed someone, it excites him so much he fucks / harder than he has ever fucked." (50) Later in the poem, she has her own quake: "What was arousing, to me, / for three decades, was faithfulness, the / chains of orgasms extreme beyond violent /in safety." (50) She never lost her faith.
In "Gliss Aria" she celebrates the bliss she's had with the gliss of her lower lips, although, she writes, "sometimes I have left them untouched, / so they cannot sing, yet they've been sweet to me, / liquidy, sleek, lissome, with some / faint fragrance of salted nectar." (64) At other times it's more about the music, as when she carts some LPs over to her lover's place and gets laid for the first time in "Long-Playing Aria":
-my body which had hardly been touched,
even through my clothes-to be that passive
verb, with flowered in it, by a light-shedding
laughing man who seemed to not love
anyone, like a god. (75)
Her caesuras open like orchidal maneuvers in the dark, an erotic mythopoesis at work.
Some of the best poems in Arias come in the joie de vivre and humor of her baby poems. In "Objective Permanence Aria," Olds imagines that first self-conscious moment of delightful other-being:
What a moment it was, in my life, when my mother
would leave the room, and I knew she still
existed! I was connected to that giant
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