Strike Sparks

by Sharon Olds

All but one descend from the wood

  back of the flatbed truck. He lies,

  shoes pointed North and South,

  knuckles curled under on the splintered slats,

  head thrown back as if he is in

  a field, his face tilted up

  toward the sky, to get the sun on it, to

  darken it more and more toward the color of the human.

  Of All the Dead That Have Come

  to Me, This Once

  I have never written against the dead. I feel as

  if I would open my shirt to them, the

  cones still making sugary milk, but when

  Grandfather’s 14-carat pocketwatch

  came in by air over the Rockies,

  over the shorn yellow of the fields

  and the winter rivers, with Grandmother’s blank

  face pressed against his name in the back,

  I thought of how he put the empty

  plate in front of my sister, turned out

  the lights after supper, sat in the ashen

  room with the fire, the light of the flames

  flashing, in his glass eye, in that

  cabin where he taught my father his notion

  of what a man’s life was, and I said

  No. I said, Let this one be dead.

  Let the fall he made through the glass roof,

  splintering, turning, the companion shanks and

  slices of glass in the air, be his last

  appearance here.

  Miscarriage

  When I was a month pregnant, the great

  clots of blood appeared in the pale

  green swaying water of the toilet,

  brick red like black in the salty

  translucent brine, like forms of life

  appearing, jellyfish with the clear-cut

  shapes of fungi.

  That was the only appearance made

  by that child, the rough, scalloped shapes

  falling slowly. A month later

  our son was conceived, and I never went back

  to mourn the one who came as far as the

  sill with its information: that we could

  botch something, you and I. All wrapped in

  purple it floated away, like a messenger

  put to death for bearing bad news.

  My Father Snoring

  Deep in the night, I would hear it through the wall—

  my father snoring, the dense, tuneless

  clotted mucus rising in his nose and

  falling, like coils of seaweed a wave

  brings in and takes back. The clogged roar

  filled the house. Even down in the kitchen,

  in the drawers, the knives and forks hummed

  with that distant throbbing. But in my room,

  next to theirs, it was so loud

  I could feel myself inside his body,

  lifted on the knotted rope of his life

  and lowered again, into the narrow

  ragged well, its amber walls

  slick around my torso, the smell of bourbon

  pungent as sputum. He lay like a felled

  beast all night and sounded his thick

  buried stoppered call, like a cry for

  help. And no one ever came:

  there were none of his kind around there anywhere.

  The Moment

  When I saw the red Egyptian stain,

  I went down into the house to find you, Mom—

  past the grandfather clock, with its huge

  ochre moon, past the burnt

  sienna woodwork, rubbed and glazed.

  I went lower and lower down into the

  body of the house, down below

  the level of the earth,

  I found you there

  where I had never found you, by the old sink,

  your hands to the elbow in soapy water,

  and above your head, the blazing windows

  at the surface of the ground.

  You looked up from the zinc tub,

  a short haggard pretty woman

  of forty, one week divorced.

  “I’ve got my period, Mom,” I said,

  and saw your face abruptly break open and

  glow with joy. “Baby,” you said,

  coming toward me, hands out and

  covered with tiny delicate bubbles like seeds.

  The Connoisseuse of Slugs

  When I was a connoisseuse of slugs

  I would part the ivy leaves, and look for the

  naked jelly of those greenish creatures,

  translucent strangers glistening along

  the stones, slowly, their gelatinous bodies

  at my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivel

  to nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,

  but I was not interested in that. What I liked

  was to draw aside the ivy, breathe

  the odor of the wall, and stand there in silence

  until the slug forgot I was there

  and sent its antennae up out of its

  head, the glimmering umber horns

  rising like telescopes, until finally the

  sensitive knobs would pop out the ends,

  unerring and intimate. Years later,

  when I first saw a naked man,

  I gasped with pleasure to see that quiet

  mystery reenacted, the slow

  elegant being coming out of hiding and

  gleaming in the powdery air, eager and so

  trusting you could weep.

  New Mother

  A week after our child was born,

  you cornered me in the spare room

  and we sank down on the bed.

  You kissed me and kissed me, my milk undid its

  burning slipknot through my nipples,

  soaking my shirt. All week I had smelled of milk,

  fresh milk, sour. I began to throb:

  my sex had been torn easily as cloth by the

  crown of her head, I’d been cut with a knife and

  sewn, the stitches pulling at my skin—and the

  first time you’re broken, you don’t know

  you’ll be healed again, better than before.

  I lay in fear and blood and milk

  while you kissed and kissed me, your lips hot and swollen

  as a teenage boy’s, your sex dry and big,

  all of you so tender, you hung over me,

  over the nest of the stitches, over the

  splitting and tearing, with the patience of someone who

  finds a wounded animal in the woods

  and stays with it, not leaving its side

  until it is whole, until it can run again.

  Sex Without Love

  How do they do it, the ones who make love

  without love? Formal as dancers,

  gliding over each other like ice-skaters

  over the ice, fingers hooked

  inside each other’s bodies, faces

  red as steak, wine, wet as the

  children at birth whose mothers are going to

  give them away. How do they come to the

  come to the come to the God come to the

  still waters, and not love

  the one who came there with them, heat

  rising slowly as steam off their joined

  skin? I guess they are the true religious,

  the purists, the pros, the ones who will not

  accept a false Messiah, love the

  priest instead of the God. They do not

  mistake the partner for their own pleasure,

  they are like great runners: they know they are alone

  with the road surface, the cold, the wind,

  the fit of their shoes, their overall cardio-vascular

  health—just factors, like the other

  in the bed, and not their truth, which is

  the single body alone in the universe

  against
its own best time.

  Ecstasy

  As we made love for the third day,

  cloudy and dark, as we did not stop but went

  into it, and into it, and

  did not hesitate and did not hold back we

  rose through the air, until we were up above

  timber line. The lake lay,

  icy and silver, the surface shirred,

  reflecting nothing. The black rocks

  lifted around it, into the grainy

  sepia air, the patches of snow

  brilliant white, and even though we

  did not know where we were, we could not

  speak the language, we could hardly see, we

  did not stop, rising with the black

  rocks to the black hills, the black

  mountains rising from the hills. Resting

  on the crest of the mountains, one huge

  cloud with scalloped edges of blazing

  evening light, we did not turn back,

  we stayed with it, even though we were

  far beyond what we knew, we rose

  into the grain of the cloud, even though we were

  frightened, the air hollow, even though

  nothing grew there, even though it is a

  place from which no one has ever come back.

  Exclusive

  (for my daughter)

  I lie on the beach, watching you

  as you lie on the beach, memorizing you

  against the time when you will not be with me:

  your empurpled lips, swollen in the sun

  and smooth as the inner lips of a shell;

  your biscuit-gold skin, glazed and

  faintly pitted, like the surface of a biscuit;

  the serious knotted twine of your hair.

  I have loved you instead of anyone else,

  loved you as a way of loving no one else,

  every separate grain of your body

  building the god, as you were built within me,

  a sealed world. What if from your lips

  I had learned the love of other lips,

  from your starred, gummed lashes the love of

  other lashes, from your shut, quivering

  eyes the love of other eyes,

  from your body the bodies,

  from your life the lives?

  Today I see it is there to be learned from you:

  to love what I do not own.

  Rite of Passage

  As the guests arrive at our son’s party

  they gather in the living room—

  short men, men in first grade

  with smooth jaws and chins.

  Hands in pockets, they stand around

  jostling, jockeying for place, small fights

  breaking out and calming. One says to another

  How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So?

  They eye each other, seeing themselves

  tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their

  throats a lot, a room of small bankers,

  they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you

  up, a seven says to a six,

  the midnight cake, round and heavy as a

  turret, behind them on the table. My son,

  freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,

  chest narrow as the balsa keel of a

  model boat, long hands

  cool and thin as the day they guided him

  out of me, speaks up as a host

  for the sake of the group.

  We could easily kill a two-year-old,

  he says in his clear voice. The other

  men agree, they clear their throats

  like Generals, they relax and get down to

  playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

  35/10

  Brushing out our daughter’s brown

  silken hair before the mirror

  I see the grey gleaming on my head,

  the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it

  just as we begin to go

  they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck

  clarifying as the fine bones of her

  hips sharpen? As my skin shows

  its dry pitting, she opens like a moist

  precise flower on the tip of a cactus;

  as my last chances to bear a child

  are falling through my body, the duds among them,

  her full purse of eggs, round and

  firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about

  to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled

  fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old

  story—the oldest we have on our planet—

  the story of replacement.

  The Missing Boy

  (for Etan Patz)

  Every time we take the bus

  my son sees the picture of the missing boy.

  He looks at it like a mirror—the dark

  straw hair, the pale skin,

  the blue eyes, the electric-blue sneakers with

  slashes of jagged gold. But of course that

  kid is little, only six and a half,

  an age when things can happen to you,

  when you’re not really safe, and our son is seven,

  practically fully grown—why, he would

  tower over that kid if they could

  find him and bring him right here on this bus and

  stand them together. He holds to the pole,

  wishing for that, the tape on the poster

  gleaming over his head, beginning to

  melt at the center and curl at the edges as it

  ages. At night, when I put him to bed,

  my son holds my hand tight

  and says he’s sure that kid’s all right,

  nothing to worry about, he just

  hopes he’s getting the food he likes,

  not just any old food, but the food

  he likes the most, the food he is used to.

  Bestiary

  Nostrils flared, ears pricked,

  our son asks me if people can mate with

  animals. I say it hardly

  ever happens. He frowns, fur and

  skin and hooves and teeth and tails

  whirling in his brain. You could do it,

  he says, and we talk about elephants

  and parakeets, until we are rolling on the

  floor, laughing like hyenas. Too late,

  I remember love—I backtrack

  and try to slip it in, but that is

  not what he means. Seven years old,

  he is into hydraulics, pulleys, doors

  which fly open in the side of the body,

  entrances, exits. Flushed, panting,

  hot for physics, he thinks about lynxes,

  eagles, pythons, mosquitoes, girls,

  casting a glittering eye of use

  over creation, wanting to know

  exactly how the world was made to receive him.

  The One Girl at the Boys’ Party

  When I take our girl to the swimming party

  I set her down among the boys. They tower

  and bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,

  her math scores unfolding in the air around her.

  They will strip to their suits, her body hard and

  indivisible as a prime number,

  they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract

  her height from ten feet, divide it into

  hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers

  bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine

  in the bright-blue pool. When they climb out,

  her ponytail will hang its pencil lead

  down her back, her narrow silk suit

  with hamburgers and french fries printed on it

  will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will

  see her sweet face, solemn and

  sealed, a factor of one, and she will

  see their eyes, two each,<
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  their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,

  one each, and in her head she’ll be doing her

  wild multiplying, as the drops

  sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.

  from The Gold Cell

  Summer Solstice, New York City

  By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,

  he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building

  and over the soft, tarry surface

  to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice

  and said if they came a step closer that was it.

  Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,

  the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,

  and one put on a bulletproof vest, a

  dense shell around his own life,

  life of his children’s father, in case

  the man was armed, and one, slung with a

  rope like the sign of his bounden duty,

  came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building

  like the hole they say is in the top of the head,

  and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.

  The tallest cop approached him directly,

  softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,

  while the man’s leg hung over the lip of the next world

  and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the

  hairy net with its implacable grid was

  unfolded, near the curb, and spread out, and

  stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive at a birth.

  Then they all came a little closer

  where he squatted next to his death, his shirt

  glowing its milky glow like something

  growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then

  everything stopped

  as his body jerked and he

  stepped down from the parapet and went toward them

  and they closed on him, I thought they were going to

  beat him up, as a mother whose child has been

  lost might scream at the child when it’s found, they

  took him by the arms and held him up and

  leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the

  tall cop lit a cigarette

  in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and