Week #4—Sign Inventory

“Topography” by Sharon Olds

The tone of this clever poem is both sensual and humorous.

All of the verbs apply to sexual intimacy and used with place names supply the poem’s humor.

The nouns in the first three lines, “country,” “bed,” and “bodies,” delineate a journey of worlds from impersonal to intimate, large to small, general to specific. The ending of the poem reverses this order, going from “cities” to “states” to “nation.”

The poem’s ending wraps up loose ends (no pun intended) and provides the same kind of unifying satisfaction of a closed ending in Romantic fiction.

Each partner seems to have qualifiers which oppose the other’s, except for Kansas, which they share in common. Kansas occurs in the middle of the poem, indicating a peak or climax.

The phrase “laid our bodies delicately together” suggests a timidity which is contrasted at the poem’s end with the deliberate “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

There are three categories of juxtapostioning:  direction (East and West), time zones (EST, PT, MT, CT) and space objects (sun and moon).

Lines 14-17 imply the rolling over of the bodies in a kind of kinetic onomatopoeia.

The phrase “four bodies of the sky” invites further study: Does the speaker mean the two lovers plus the sun and moon, as if the lovers were gods or spiritually elevated, or does she mean the sun and moon as seen from the bed as the two roll around? Are there other implications?