Curve of Departure takes its name from a line in the poem “First Thanksgiving” by American poet Sharon Olds. Olds published her first book Satan Says (1980) at 37. She has since become one of the most acclaimed living poets in the United States.
Her work uses everyday language to relate ordinary events—a phone call with her mother, the clanking of a space heater in a doctor’s office, the bodies of the dolls she and her sister played with as children, surprising and specific descriptions of her own body, the first time she grabbed her daughter’s hand to stop her from misbehaving—and with direct, near-forensic specificity (what critic Dwight Garner calls her “scalding honesty”) draws a line between these personal moments and larger insights about memory, aging, power. Writer Michael Ondaatje calls her work, “Pure fire in the hands.”
In “First Thanksgiving”, the speaker reflects on her daughter’s first visit home after starting college—the familiarity and strangeness of a sleeping child that slips into an image of wildness and release that pierces to the heart of the dance between dependence and flight between parent and child. It comes all at once—the suddenness of insight, the shock of connection. As in the Rachel Bonds’s play it gives title to, “First Thanksgiving” gains its power from the apt but unexpected shift from mundane to transcendent, present to past to sudden bridge between the two.
—Adrien-Alice Hansel, Dramaturg
First Thanksgiving
By Sharon Olds
When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object,
like a soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, after him, fresh
from the other world—which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months,
in a slow blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air—I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.
Sharon Olds, “First Thanksgiving” from Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002. Copyright © 2004 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.