Someone said, Do you miss the Bay Area,
and suddenly I adored the phrase “the Bay Area,”
as if “area” were a newly made word
made between a body of water and a shore,
still fresh from its making, still washed by the Bay.
Do I miss the Bay Area? If it had felt as if I belonged to it,
I would miss it to death—
not the sight of the prison where people
waited to be fried in metal chairs by the State and its God—
but the diesel water licking Emeryville,
the sea lions on Seal Rock below Cliff House,
the thousands of kinds of trees like a cloth factory with
millions of bolts of leaf-shapes and cone-patterns;
and the insects, the bees, dragons, damsels, wasps, hornets, flies;
eucalyptus tearing off her clothes in pieces,
her little blue socket-knocker hatboxes,
the live-oaks’ billion pen-point nib-needles,
the trees’ shadows like dropped black skirts under them
on the burnt-grass ground.
Someone said to me in the Bay Area,
You must miss Galway a lot, and I frowned, I didn’t like that,
and I said, If I thought
he was never coming back,
I’d be so bereft, so angry at God, as if the
world had been taken from me when Galway had left.
I know what he gave us will stay with us—
but he is never coming back. I know that this
has never been our permanent home.
It’s a wild dance, hands grasping and
letting go and grasping. And I am never coming back.
I am not leaving, and I’m not coming back.
—Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds, a native San Franciscan who lives in New York, is the author of Stag’s Leap, The Gold Cell, The Dead and the Living, and many other books of poetry.
