Rear View

Within the great depth of honesty and reality of Olds pain, anger and emotional movement that she shares with us she has a great sense of humor. Olds gives us a taste of it in her new blossoming relationship with her mother in her last days, some of Olds later work. Olds also shows it in her poem "Self Portrait, Rear View" and as you can only imagine, especially if you are a woman what this poem entails.

Def Poetry "Self Portrait, Rear View" by Sharon Olds

Diagnosis

By the time I was six months old, she knew something

was wrong with me. I got looks on my face

she had not seen on any child

in the family, or the extended family,

or the neighborhood. My mother took me in

to the pediatrician with the kind hands,

a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:

Hub Long. My mom did not tell him

what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.

It was just these strange looks on my face-

he held me, and conversed with me,

chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother

said, She's doing it now! Look!

She's doing it now! and the doctor said,

What your daughter has

is called a sense

of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me

back to the house where that sense would be tested

and found to be incurable.

Self Portrait, Rear View

At first, I do not believe it, in the hotel

triple mirror, that that is my body, in

back, below the waist, and above

the legs- the thing that doesn't stop moving

when I stop moving.

And it doesn't look like just one thing,

or even one big, double thing

- even the word saddlebags has a

smooth, calfskin feel to it,

compared to this compendium

of net string bags shaking their booty of

cellulite fruits and nuts. Some lumps

look like bonbons translated intact

from chocolate box to buttocks, the curl on top

showing, slightly, through my skin. Once I see what I can

do with this, I do it, high- stepping

to make the rapids of my bottom rush

in ripples like a world wonder. Slowly,

I believe what I am seeing, a 54- year old

rear end, once a tight end,

high and mighty, almost a chicken butt, now

exhausted, as if tragic. But this is not

an invasion, my cul-de-sac is not being

used to hatch alien cells, ball peens,

gyroscopes, sacks of marbles. It’s my hoard

of treasure, my good luck, not to be

dead, yet, though when I flutter

the wings of my ass again, and see,

the clutch of eggs, each egg,

on its own, as if shell- less, shudder, I wonder

if anyone has ever died,

looking in the mirror, of horror. I think I will

not even catch a cold from it,

I will go to school to it, to Butt

Boot Camp, to the video store, where I saw,

in the window, my hero, my workout jelly

role model, my apotheosis: Killer Buns.