Ode to Sharon Olds’ “Ode to the Creature from the Black Lagoon”

by Regina Dilgen

It was made the year I was born

And I watched it when I was 13, too.

You told us you related to the great slimy monster and its aloneness

And I did, too.

You and I knew it understood

That it was the only one of his kind

And how strange it felt,

And how it glistened.

But mainly I felt like that young woman it stole

To take to its lair

Made so passive by that world of

The steamer boat named Rita and its scientists, its captain,

That she could only thrash her legs.

Made so unsure of her strength in that tight bathing suit

That she only knew to cry for help.

They saved her, yes, but she might as well have been a goner.

She had no thought

Of scissor swimming away on scaled legs,

Of navigating with a great ridged fin along her back,

Of flexing the muscles of her own webbed feet.

We were 13, Sharon, so we didn’t know yet how to scream back at the screen

To tell her that she could find her own

Her own secret grotto

That she could deep dive

To her own hidden lair.

Regina Dilgen, Ph.D., served as Professor of English and Department Chair at Palm Beach State College in Lake Worth, Florida. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in The Dewdrop, Chameleon Chimera: An Anthology of Florida Poets, redrosethorns, Blueline, Earth’s Daughters, Quartler(ly), Persimmon Tree, Passager, and Apollo’s Lute. She was a featured poet at a Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches reading. She lives in Delray Beach, Florida, where she writes and paints.