The first time it happened I could forgive myself. Cutting across the hall from my office and glimpsing a man—pale, wearing metal-rimmed glasses, a thin man in a light-colored rolled-sleeve shirt and khaki pants, busy with files he was returning or extricating from a chin-high bank of beige metal cabinets lining the wall to my right, just inside the departmental office—nothing unforgivable about being confused a split second by the sight of someone I knew was dead, dead a good long while, dead and buried two thousand miles away in cold, high Wyoming, the dead man Roger Wilson’s office down and across from mine, fourth-floor Bartlett Hall, the dozen years I’d taught at U.W., so countless times I’d catch him hunched over his desk under a window opposite the door he always left slightly ajar, puttering in his share of the ubiquitous metal file cabinets that graced Bartlett and also preside here in this English department located in a building I find myself sometimes calling Bartlett, or rather find myself unable to recall this building’s name once Bartlett pops into my head, even after ten years of coming and going through this building’s glass vestibule and thick double doors, one with a push button and ramp for handicap access; nothing unusual or shameful about seeing dead Roger Wilson and silently calling out his name, surprised, hopeful, though I knew better than to believe I’d actually seen him, the flesh-and-bone body I realized now I was staring at could not belong to dead Roger Wilson who’d canceled his claim to a body long ago with a shotgun blast and become a lost soul, visible in this office only to me unless someone could enter my skull, pick their way through the mess of overflowing drawers, files, stacked newspapers, bags of trash, reach the place in my mind where Roger Wilson had suddenly appeared, sudden but rooted firm, solid as a tree planted two decades ago, you wouldn’t blame me, might forgive me as easily as I forgive myself for mixing up names, places, the living and dead because it could happen to anyone, happens frequently and usually passes without comment, it’s so ordinary and startling at the same time, people figure it’s not worth mentioning, who else would want to hear about such an inconsequential moment of slippage, let alone care whether you are mixed up an instant about the identity of a man you glimpse out of the corner of your eye, a split second of confusion leading nowhere except in a heartbeat back to the commonplace reality of a Tuesday, late in the afternoon, postseminar, post a dawn commute from New York City to the university in Massachusetts where I’ve landed and stuck since leaving the mountain West, when I step catty-corner across the hall and there’s old schoolmarm lean and severe, great white hunter and sorry-ass alcoholic, my buddy Roger wasting his good mind and precious time as usual futzing with files, documenting the shamefully low graduation rate of minority student-athletes or serving as liaison between physical sciences and humanities for an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural project of team teaching or organizing a new, socially relevant concentration perhaps one day a major, a department where now there is none, its absence or presence a ghost agitating the fertile, slightly hungover brain of my former colleague who’s risen from the grave to occupy a place here in Logan Hall, then just as quickly relinquishes it, fades and that’s Charley staring at me, Charley Morin puzzled because he’s caught me staring, an unconventionally long and thus suspect pause, our eyes locked and neither of us offering an explanation, an awkward silence I interrupt finally to clear the air, to sweep away the indecision that must have emptied my gaze of expression and caused Charley perhaps to feel vaguely responsible, perhaps challenged, minding his own business, then sensing the weight of eyes on his scrawny shoulders, he turns, meets an undecipherable look with a quizzical tilt of his head, his eyes invisible behind thick lenses whose steel rims catch fire as he straightens, shoot a silver tracer to the ceiling, the crimson afterimage slowly deforming in the air, and I recall the words pillars of light I heard first coming from the mouth of a physicist and vice president at the University of Wyoming who was attempting to explain to me during intermission of a lunch meeting something beautiful and eerie I reported observing one night camped out in the Snowies,
Sharon Olds
The I is Made of Paper
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Sharon Olds discusses sex, religion, and writing poems that “women were definitely not supposed to write,” in an excerpt from her Art of Poetry interview with Jessica Laser. Olds also reads three of her poems: “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” (issue no. 74, Fall–Winter 1978), “True Love,” and “The Easel.”
This episode was produced and sound-designed by John DeLore. The audio recording of “Sisters of Sexual Treasure” is courtesy of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.
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