You Kindly

You Kindly
by Sharon Olds
pg. 497-8

This poem represents another side of Olds' poetry, as compared to The Glass, which I will be writing my paper on. This poem has great sexual details, while The Glass has more details regarding death and decay. Olds heavily uses details of the female body throughout the poem, in terms of sexual pleasure and the physicalness of the relationship between her and her partner. Though it is a very sexual poem, it is more descriptive, and not necessarily passionate. To quote the poem, it is "like a grey flower / the color of the brain", it is not full of love and exhileration, instead it is more a physical experience. Also interesting is the fact that Olds brings her father into the poem, yet again. She mentions she "did not think of her father's hair" while she is brushing her lover's hair back. To think of your father at a time like this is very unusual and unexpected; it seemed very out of the blue and jarring. The mention of her father also made the passion of the sex degrade, especially.