Virginal Orgy
by Sharon Olds
In our Sophomore year, Solomon Wheat
Senior, Captain of the high-school team,
Carried us to the Tournament of Champions,
And we won. I left the game with my friend
The hourglass beauty, and her friend the President
Of the Sophomore class. He put an arm
Around each of us,
as if there were two of him, one
for her, and one for me, and I felt,
through him, linked to her long, tilted
eyes and Scythian-bow lips
and very small waist and the large globes of her
breasts. It was almost as if I could look
into a mirror held by Mike
and see myself as Liz, the way we had
seen ourselves as Solomon Wheat.
I felt that Mike was hugging me
Partly so he could hug Liz,
as if I were the small price he was
paying for embracing her glory. But mostly
I felt his warm, male, popular
arm around me, it was April, we were walking near
a small, flowering tree, and he steered us
into, and under, and up inside it,
and he kissed Liz, I looked into the maze
of the living stems of the wild nosegays,
and then he turned, and kissed me,
and his lips were so much bigger and softer
than my mother’s, each of his lips was larger
than her whole mouth, and the skin of his lips was like
a newborn’s skin, and the flesh of his mouth,
underneath, was so soft that each lip
seemed to be splashing like a bucket inside
The back of my head got faint, like early
Communion on an empty stomach, and that central
core, down inside me, did the
thing like a heavy gulp, with the rings
of hotness circling out. And then
he was kissing Liz, I was standing within
the standing bouquet, the inside of the tree not
estranged to me, the tightness and loose
burstness of its crowded petals
not unknown to me, and then
he kissed me again, and this time
I had forgotten my mother-this was my first
return to him, my mouth already
wise in its hunger, feeling as if nothing
I would wish would be forbidden to it.
When he kissed Liz, I stood aside
enchanted in cherry-trance, waiting for what
was promised and would return, as if
by vow of matter, the low central
throat gulping in emotion as if swallowing
tears. I would look around, in the bower—
the twigs and branches of our canopy
made triangles, isosceles and right, and a dropping
down of a tryst hypotenuse—
in the cone of the tree I almost understood
Geometry, the Trinity,
Triune Love, and the fierce tingle
of the triangle I had whirl-struck
as a child. And now I knew the kiss,
and from it the hour when the other woman
would go her way, and his other arm
would come around, like the other half
of the sky, and all the angles would close
and the wings of the sphere open, slowly burst open
