The Long Night of Flying
by Sharon Olson

“Like a bird, Sharon Olson flies us over western civilization—its art and its history—stopping here and there to collect bits with which to weave her idiosyncratic travelogue. Her eye probes unlit crevices and finds its morsel in the shadows, and her ear is tuned to the music playing even amidst the white noise of loss.”
—Lucia Perillo

SHARON OLSON has recently moved to Guilford, Connecticut. She retired in 2007 from the Palo Alto (California) City Library where she had been a reference librarian and cataloger since 1978. She earned a B.A. in Art History from Stanford and attended its campus in Florence, Italy, in 1967. She also has an M.L.S. from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon. Her chapbook, Clouds Brushed in Later, was selected by Carolyn Forché as the winner of the Abby Niebauer Memorial Chapbook award and was published by the San Jose Poetry Center Press in 1987. The Long Night of Flying is her first full-length collection of poems.

POEMS FROM The Long Night of Flying

Remembering in Part

The Church is auctioning off its precious artifacts.
My mother’s hands press into the floured dough.

In lot three, a set of praying hands,
nineteenth century, Alsace-Lorraine.
With her hands behind my head like a benediction,
my mother pushes me off to school.

I am searching for a body, terra-cotta, to go with these hands.
When she danced with my father, my mother
had to reach up high to clasp his neck.

In the next millennium, all the severed limbs
and detached torsos will reassemble, will resemble a whole.
In a quiet corner of the house, my father holds my mother.
I find them this way, in my room, weeping.

Intermission at the Scuola di San Rocco

We both had the right idea, picking up a mirror
to study the ceiling, looking down instead of up,
and because we were taking small steps, edging
toward the middle of the room, we might have
passed each other silently in the busy hall.

Earlier that day our train broke through the Euganean Hills,
an unlikely outcropping of hopeful green.
After they were gone the fields were flat again,
only so much work the Po could do.

If a gondola can be repaired, wood scraped and repainted,
and Tintoretto can remain fresh under close inspection
by handheld mirror, and hills can stand alone when all
adjoining land is fast asleep, then words can mend,
the hasty ones we wish to gather back again, all saved
by a look from you, from me, in the Scuola di San Rocco,
exchanging colors on our walk across the room.

ORDER BOOK

sewn paperback / 96 pages
ISBN 0-9767642-1-0
price: $15.00

publication date:
April 2006

Hear Sharon Olson read poems as featured poet on the Princeton Public Library National Poetry Month podcast blog.

Hear Sharon Olson read her poems on KQED's website, The Writers' Block: KQED Arts: Profile - Sharon Olson  

The recorded podcast is 8 min., 34 sec. long.

Join Sharon Olson in The Red Room: where the writers are.

Read about the Waverley Writers Anniversary Book, co-edited by Sharon Olson, in the June 22, 2007 issue of the Palo Alto Weekly here (see page 11 of the pdf file).

Read about Sharon Olson in the June 7, 2006 issue of the Palo Alto Weekly