When no one’s around, a man could go
all day, in the woods, and down by the lake,
and into the house and back out in the garden,
without zipping his pants. The belt
holds them up, around his hips,
secure as any loin cloth
or lava-lava, the man is free
and unobserved, observing the land
and its creatures, each aware of him,
but not of his costume,
or the partial uncostume of his liberty,
but only of the actions of his homemaking art,
his music of earth’s caretaking—
forest trails blazed with ribbon,
pitcher plants transplanted, wood
sawn and split, stacked or scattered,
and part of the pleasure is to be unfettered,
a hem of a leg of the boxers sometimes
showing through the open fly
like a flag of home. And someone who loves him
loves that flash of carefreeness, that
hanky peeking out of an eden pocket,
an eden with no God or Eve in it,
but only the original Adam. But someone
who loves him had better not sing it, it is no one’s
business but his. If someone sings him—
the way his labors are singing nature—it might
seem as if the scenery spoke,
or as if some Lilith, her work of words
no less at home than his work of creation,
sang him as he sings the earth,
language escaping her lips as a corner of
fabric escapes his jeans like the jousting
favor of one who is in thrall to no one,
only to freedom.
Copyright © 2025 by Sharon Olds. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 24, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
