by Sharon Olds
Little Things
After she’s gone to camp, in the early
evening I clear our girl’s breakfast dishes
from the rosewood table, and find a dinky
crystallized pool of maple syrup, the
grains standing there, round, in the night, I
rub it with my fingertip
as if I could read it, this raised dot of
amber sugar, and this time,
when I think of my father, I wonder why
I think of my father, of the Vulcan blood-red
glass in his hand, or his black hair gleaming like a
broken-open coal. I think I learned to
love the little things about him
because of all the big things
I could not love, no one could, it would be wrong to.
So when I fix on this image of resin
or sweep together with the heel of my hand a
pile of my son’s sunburn peels like
insect wings, where I peeled his back the night before camp,
I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty to
fiind things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.
The Latest Injury
When my son comes home from the weekend trip where he
stood up into a piece of steel in the
ceiling of a car and cut open his head and
had the wound shaved and sprayed
and stitches taken, he comes up to me
grinning with pride and fear and slowly
bows his head, as if to the god of trauma,
and there it is, his scalp blue-grey as the
skin of a corpse, the surface cold and
gelatinous, the long split
straight as if deliberate, the
sutures on either side like terrible
marks of human will. I say
Amazing, I press his head to my stomach
gently, the naked skin on top
quivering like the skin on boiled milk and
bluish as the epidermis of a monkey
drawn out of his mother dead, the
faint growth of fine hair like a
promise. I rock his brain in my arms as I
once rocked his whole body,
delivered, and the wound area glows
grey and translucent as a fledgling’s head when it
teeters on the edge of the nest, the cut a
midline down the skull, the flesh
jelly, the stitches black, the slit saying
taken, the thread saying given back.
The Quest
The day my girl is lost for an hour,
the day I think she is gone forever and then I find her,
I sit with her awhile and then I
go to the corner store for orange juice for her
lips, tongue, palate, throat,
stomach, blood, every gold cell of her body.
I joke around with the guy behind the counter, I
walk out into the winter air and
weep. I know he would never hurt her,
never take her body in his hands to
crack it or crush it, would keep her safe and
bring her home to me. Yet there are
those who would. I pass the huge
cockeyed buildings massive as prisons,
charged, loaded, cocked with people,
some who would love to take my girl, to undo
her, fine strand by fine
strand. These are buildings full of rope,
ironing-boards, sash, wire,
iron-cords woven in black and blue spirals like
umbilici, apartments supplied with
razor-blades and lye. This is my
quest, to know where it is, the evil in the
human heart. As I walk home I
look in face after face for it, I
see the dark beauty, the rage, the
grown-up children of the city she walks as a
child, a raw target. I cannot
see a soul who would do it, I clutch the
jar of juice like a cold heart,
remembering the time my parents tied me to a chair and
would not feed me and I looked up
into their beautiful faces, my stomach a
bright mace, my wrists like birds the
shrike has hung by the throat from barbed wire, I
gazed as deep as I could into their eyes
and all I saw was goodness, I could not get past it.
I rush home with the blood of oranges
pressed to my breast, I cannot get it to her fast enough.
Our Son and the Water Shortage
When the water shortage comes along
he’s been waiting all his life for it,
all nine years for something to need him as the
water needs him now. He becomes
its protector—he stops washing, till dirt
shines on the bones behind his ears
over his occiput, and his hands
blaze like badges of love. He will not
flush the toilet, putting the life of the
water first, until the bowl
crusts with gold like the heart’s riches and his
room stinks, and when I sneak in and
flush he almost weeps, holds his
hands a foot apart in the air and
says do I know there is only about
this much water left! He befriends it, he
sits by its bedside as if it is a dying
friend, a small figure of water
gleaming on the sheets. He keeps a tiny
jar to brush his teeth in, till green
bugs bathe in its scum, but talk about
germs and he’s willing to sacrifice his health
to put the life of the water first, its
helplessness breaks his heart, the way it
waits at all the faucets in the city for the
cocks to be turned, and then it cannot
help itself, it has to spill
to the last drop. Weeks go by and
our son is glazed with grime, and every
cell of dirt upon his body is a
to put the life of the water first, its
helplessness breaks his heart, the way it
waits at all the faucets in the city for the
cocks to be turned, and then it cannot
help itself, it has to spill
to the last drop. Weeks go by and
our son is glazed with grime, and every
cell of dirt upon his body is a
molecule of water saved and he
loves those tiny molecules
translucent as his own flesh in the spring, this
thin vivid liquid boy who has
given his heart to water, element
so much like a nine-year-old—you can
cut it, channel it, see through it and
watch it, then, a fifty-foot
tidal wave, approaching your house and
picking up speed as it comes.
Liddy’s Orange
The rind lies on the table where our girl has left it
torn into pieces the size of petals and
curved like petals, rayed out like a
full-blown rose, one touch will make it come apart.
The lining of the rind is wet and chalky as
Devonshire cream, rich as the glaucous
lining of a boiled egg, all that protein
cupped in the ripped shell. And the navel,
torn out, carefully,
lies there, like a fat, gold
bouquet, and the scar of the stem, picked out
with her nails, and still attached to the white
thorn of the central integument,
lies on the careful heap, a tool laid
down at the end of
a ceremony.
All here speaks of ceremony,
the sheen of acrid juice, which is all that is
left of the flesh, the pieces lying in
profound order like natural order,
as if this simply happened, the way her
life at 13 looks like something that’s just
happening, unless you see her
standing over it, delicately clawing it open.
When My Son Is Sick
When my son is so sick that he falls asleep
in the middle of the day, his small oval
hard head hurting so much he prefers to let go of consciousness like
someone dangling from a burning rope just
letting go of his life, I sit and
hardly breathe. I think about the
half-liquid skin of his lips,
swollen and nicked with red slits like the
fissures in a volcano crust, down
which you see the fire. Though I am
down the hall from him I see the
quick bellies of his eyeballs jerk
behind the greenish lids, his temples
red and sour with pain, his skin going
pale gold as cold butter and then
turning a little like rancid butter till the
freckles seem to spread, black little
islands of mold, he sleeps the awful
sleep of the sick, his hard-working heart
banging like pipes inside his body, like a
shoe struck on iron bars when
someone wants to be let out, I
sit, I sit very still, I am out at the
rim of the world, the edge they saw
when they knew it was flat—the torn edge,
thick and soil-black, the vessels and
veins and tendons hanging free,
dangling down,
when my boy is sick I sit on the lip of
nothing and hang my legs over
and sometimes let a shoe fall
to give it something.
The Prayer
(for my daughter)
Today I remembered the dryness of her mouth as she
sat in the underground waiting room while her
gerbils were being gassed. It was all she could
say and she said it over and over,
I am thirsty, like a prayer, as he pumped the air
out of the euthanasia box
and pumped the monoxide in, and they curled
up on their sides, her babies, their paws
cupping the blue tumors on their bellies
like hoarded treasure. She sat against the
wall, with just the width of it
between her back and the earth, solid
dirt—and there was still time to save them,
her heart pumping, she was sweating, pallid, not
salivating at all, the adrenaline
rushing through her body to help her burst through the
waiting-room door and rip out the gas-pipe and
scoop them up in her palms while their tails still twitched,
the adrenaline pumping through her body to give her the
strength to stay there in her chair and let the
blue tumors be put to sleep, and she
sat there and said I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty.
She did not want to talk about heaven,
she did not want to talk about death,
she did not want to talk about orange juice,
she did not want to talk about thirst,
she just wanted to say it, over and over,
the way you repeat something when you are learning it
for the first time, I am thirsty. I am thirsty. I am thirsty.
The Signs
As I stand with the other parents outside the
camp bus, its windows tinted black
so we see our children, if we can find them, as
figures seen through a haze, like the dead,
I marvel at how little it takes to
tell me which is my son—just a
tuft of hair, like the crest on the titmouse that
draws the titmice swiftly to its side.
Or all I see is the curve of a chin
scooped and pointed as some shining Italian
utensil for milk-white pasta with garlic,
that’s my boy. All the other
mothers, too, can pick their kid by a
finger, a nose in the smoked mirror
as if we have come to identify their bodies
and take them home—such a cloud of fear and longing
hangs above the long drawn-out departure,
but finally it’s over, each hand made of
just such genes and no others
waves its characteristic wave,
our boy’s thin, finny hand
rotating like a windshield wiper, and they’re
off in a Stygian stink of exhaust,
and then I would know his bus anywhere, in
any traffic jam, as it moves through the
bad air with the other buses,
its own smooth, black shoulder
above the crowd, and when it turns the corner
I would know this world anywhere
as my son’s world, I would love it any time in his name.
I See My Girl
When I see you off to camp, I see you
bending your neck to the weight of your cello, I
see your small torso under the
load of your heavy knapsack the way a
boulder would rest on the body of a child, and
suddenly I see your goodness, the weight of your
patient dogged goodness as you slog your
things to the plane, you look like a small-boned
old lady carrying all the family goods.
Suddenly the whole airport is full of your goodness, your
thin hair looks whittled down by goodness, your
pale face looks drained of blood, your
upward gaze looks like the look of
someone lying under a stone.
For so long I prayed you would be good,
prayed you would not be anything like me—but I
didn’t mean this, the oppression of goodness, the
deadness. You ask for something to eat
and my heart leaps up, I take off your backpack and we
lean your cello against a chair and
then I can sit and watch you eat chocolate pudding,
spoonful after careful spoonful, your
tongue moving slowly over the mixture
in deep pleasure, Oh it’s good, Mom,
it’s good, you beam, and the air around your face
shines with the dark divided shining of goodness.
The Green Shirt
For a week after he breaks his elbow
we don’t think about giving him a bath,
we think about bones twisted like white
saplings in a tornado, tendons
twined around each other like the snakes on the
healer’s caduceus. We think about fractures and
pain, most of the time we think about pain,
and our boy with his set face goes
around the house in that green shirt
as if it were his skin, the alligator on it with
wide jaws like the ones pain has
clamped on his elbow, fine joint that
used to be thin and elegant as
something made with Tinkertoy, then it
swelled to a hard black anvil,
softened to a bruised yellow fruit,
finally we could slip the sleeve over,
and by then our boy was smelling like something
taken from the back of the icebox and
put on the back of the stove. So we stripped him and
slipped him into the tub, he looked so
naked without the sling, just a boy
/>
holding his arm with the other hand as you’d
help an old geezer across the street, and
then it hit us, the man and woman by the
side of the tub, the people who had made him,
then the week passed before our eyes
as the grease slid off him—
the smash, the screaming, the fear he had crushed his
growth-joint, the fear as he lost all the
holding his arm with the other hand as you’d
help an old geezer across the street, and
then it hit us, the man and woman by the
side of the tub, the people who had made him,
then the week passed before our eyes
as the grease slid off him—
the smash, the screaming, the fear he had crushed his
growth-joint, the fear as he lost all the
feeling in two fingers, the blood
pooled in ugly uneven streaks
under the skin in his forearm and then he
lost the use of the whole hand,
and they said he would probably sometime be back to normal,
sometime, probably, this boy with the long fingers of a surgeon,
this duck sitting in the water with his L-shaped
purple wing in his other hand.
Our eyes fill, we cannot look at each other,
we watch him carefully and kindly soap the damaged arm,
he was given to us perfect, we had sworn no harm
would come to him.
Gerbil Funeral
By the time we’re ready it’s dark, so somebody
goes for a flashlight and we all troop out to the grave
by its shuddering light. The beam goes down
into the hole deep, its talcum
sides a soft gold, the autumn has
been so dry. The crickets begin as
our daughter wraps the coffin in black plastic, a
shroud of glittering darkness, and her father with his
long arm sets it in the bottom of the pit.
Then there’s a moment of silence, none of us
knows what to do, she takes the shovel and
drops the first spadeful of dirt.
It lands with a crash so the crickets all stop a moment
and she fills it in. She will not let us
help, all that can be done for their bodies
even now her body will do, the
dust flying in a pale net
on her brother holding the light and swaying like the
Second Gravedigger. No one speaks, we
know this girl and the sweat of her silent love.
Five inches from the top, she stops and