Ode to the Female Reproductive System by Sharon Olds

Ode to the Female Reproductive System

 

I first saw you in a simple line

drawing, black and white, on an unfolded

sheet of insertion instructions, the side

view of a girl—a passageway, at a

slant, up and back, to a blunt,

humble thing, like the outline

of a wading bird’s bowed head

made on a wall by a drooped hand

held in the beam of a flashlight in the dark.

Later I saw you in an illustration

in a magazine, in full, damsel

color, the middle sister between

the magenta genie of the rectum and the little

stork dancer of the urinary bladder

up on the fine, slender leg

of the ureter. All three of you

had a rosy enclosedness, but you

were the central grace. And when I saw you, in a textbook

of anatomy, full frontal, I saw

a feral unseeing creature, like a she-ram

with great fallopian horns. In some drawings,

the fimbrial fringe at the frayed end of the

tube was reaching out, with a beckoning

suction, toward the ovary, as if

sirening up an egg—and in others

the entire apparatus of you

looked like a ghost costume, the child in it

making the haunted Woooo, woooo.

But mostly it looked like an instrument, a

graceful lyre, which would be played in me

to call a being forth from another

world, from the future, bringing her own harp with her.