Strike Sparks

by Sharon Olds

then they all lit cigarettes, and the

  red, glowing ends burned like the

  tiny campfires we lit at night

  back at the beginning of the world.

  On the Subway

  The young man and I face each other.

  His feet are huge, in black sneakers

  laced with white in a complex pattern like a

  set of intentional scars. We are stuck on

  opposite sides of the car, a couple of

  molecules stuck in a rod of energy

  rapidly moving through darkness. He has

  or my white eye imagines he has

  the casual cold look of a mugger,

  alert under lowered eyelids. He is wearing

  red, like the inside of the body

  exposed. I am wearing old fur, the

  whole skin of an animal taken

  and used. I look at his unknown face,

  he looks at my grandmother’s coat, and I don’t

  know if I am in his power—

  he could take my coat so easily, my

  briefcase, my life—

  or if he is in my power, the way I am

  living off his life, eating the steak

  he may not be eating, as if I am taking

  the food from his mouth. And he is black

  and I am white, and without meaning or

  trying to I must profit from our history,

  the way he absorbs the murderous beams of the

  nation’s heart, as black cotton

  absorbs the heat of the sun and holds it. There is

  no way to know how easy this

  white skin makes my life, this

  life he could break so easily, the way I

  think his own back is being broken, the

  rod of his soul that at birth was dark and

  fluid, rich as the heart of a seedling

  ready to thrust up into any available light.

  The Food-Thief

  (Uganda, drought)

  They drive him along the road in the steady

  conscious way they drove their cattle

  when they had cattle, when they had homes and

  living children. They drive him with pliant

  peeled sticks, snapped from trees

  whose bark cannot be eaten—snapped,

  not cut, no one has a knife, and the trees that can be

  eaten have been eaten leaf and trunk and the

  roots pulled from the ground and eaten.

  They drive him and beat him, a loose circle of

  thin men with sapling sticks,

  driving him along slowly, slowly

  beating him to death. He turns to them

  with all the eloquence of the body, the

  wrist turned out and the vein up his forearm

  running like a root just under the surface, the

  wounds on his head ripe and wet as a

  loam furrow cut back and cut back at

  plough-time to farrow a trench for the seed, his

  eye pleading, the white a dark

  occluded white like cloud-cover on the

  morning of a day of heavy rain.

  His lips are open to his brothers as the body of a

  woman might be open, as the earth itself was

  split and folded back and wet and

  seedy to them once, the lines on his lips

  fine as the thousand tributaries of a

  root-hair, a river, he is asking them for life

  with his whole body, and they are driving his body

  all the way down the road because

  they know the life he is asking for—

  it is their life.

  The Girl

  They chased her and her friend through the woods

  and caught them in a waste clearing, broken

  random bracken, a couple of old mattresses,

  as if the place had been prepared.

  The thin one with straight hair

  started raping her best friend,

  and the curly one stood above her,

  thrust his thumbs back inside her jaws, she was twelve,

  stuck his penis in her mouth and throat

  faster and faster and faster.

  Then the straight-haired one stood up—

  they lay like pulled-up roots at his feet,

  naked twelve-year-old girls—he said

  Now you’re going to know what it’s like

  to be shot five times and slaughtered like a pig,

  and they switched mattresses,

  the blond was raping and stabbing her friend,

  the straight-haired one sticking inside her

  in one place and then another,

  the point of his gun pressed deep into her waist,

  she felt a little click in her spine and a

  sting like 7-Up in her head, and then he

  pulled the tree-branch across her throat

  and everything went dark,

  the gym went dark, and her mother’s kitchen,

  even the globes of light on the rounded

  lips of her mother’s nesting bowls went dark.

  When she woke up, she was lying on the cold

  copper-smelling earth, the mattress was pulled up

  over her like a blanket, she saw

  the dead body of her best friend

  and she began to run,

  she came to the edge of the woods and she stepped

  out from the trees, like a wound debriding,

  she walked across the field to the tracks

  and said to the railway brakeman Please, sir. Please, sir.

  At the trial she had to say everything—

  her elder sister helped her with the words—

  she had to sit in the room with them

  and point to them. Now she goes to parties

  but does not smoke, she is a cheerleader,

  she throws her body up in the air

  and kicks her legs and comes home and does the dishes

  and her homework, she has to work hard in math,

  the sky over the roof of her bed

  filled with white planets. Every night

  she prays for the soul of her best friend and

  then thanks God for life. She knows

  what all of us want never to know

  and she does a cartwheel, the splits, she shakes the

  shredded pom-poms in her fists.

  The Pope’s Penis

  It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate

  clapper at the center of a bell

  It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a

  halo of silver seaweed, the hair

  swaying in the dimness and the heat—and at night,

  while his eyes sleep, it stands up

  in praise of God.

  When

  I wonder, now, only when it will happen,

  when the young mother will hear the

  noise like somebody’s pressure cooker

  down the block, going off. She’ll go out in the yard,

  holding her small daughter in her arms,

  and there, above the end of the street, in the

  air above the line of the trees,

  she will see it rising, lifting up

  over our horizon, the upper rim of the

  gold ball, large as a giant

  planet starting to lift up over ours.

  She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter,

  looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,

  and the child will open her arms to it,

  it will look so beautiful.

  I Go Back to May 1937

  I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

  I see my father strolling out

  under the ochre sandstone arch, the

  red tiles glinting like bent

  plates of blood behind his head, I

  see my mother with a few light books at her hip

  standing at the pil
lar made of tiny bricks,

  the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

  sword-tips aglow in the May air,

  they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

  they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

  innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

  I want to go up to them and say Stop,

  don’t do—she’s the wrong woman,

  he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

  you cannot imagine you would ever do,

  you are going to do bad things to children,

  you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

  you are going to want to die. I want to go

  up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

  her hungry pretty face turning to me,

  her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

  his arrogant handsome face turning to me,

  his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

  but I don’t do it. I want to live. I

  take them up like the male and female

  paper dolls and bang them together

  at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to

  strike sparks from them, I say

  Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

  Alcatraz

  When I was a girl, I knew I was a man

  because they might send me to Alcatraz

  and only men went to Alcatraz.

  Every time we drove to the city,

  I’d see it there, white as a white

  shark in the shark-rich Bay, the bars like

  milk-white ribs. I knew I had pushed my

  parents too far, my inner badness had

  spread like ink and taken me over, I could

  not control my terrible thoughts,

  terrible looks, and they had often said

  they would send me there—maybe the very next

  time I spilled my milk, Ala

  Cazam, the aluminum doors would slam, I’d be

  there where I belonged, a girl-faced man in the

  prison no one had escaped from. I did not

  fear the other prisoners,

  I knew who they were, men like me who had

  spilled their milk one time too many,

  not been able to curb their thoughts—

  what I feared was the horror of the circles: circle of

  sky around the earth, circle of

  land around the Bay, circle of

  water around the island, circle of

  sharks around the shore, circle of

  outer walls, inner walls,

  steel girders, chrome bars,

  circle of my cell around me, and there at the

  center, the glass of milk and the guard’s

  eyes upon me as I reached out for it.

  Why My Mother Made Me

  Maybe I am what she always wanted,

  my father as a woman,

  maybe I am what she wanted to be

  when she first saw him, tall and smart,

  standing there in the college yard with the

  hard male light of 1937

  shining on his slicked hair. She wanted that

  power. She wanted that size. She pulled and

  pulled through him as if he were silky

  bourbon taffy, she pulled and pulled and

  pulled through his body till she drew me out,

  sticky and gleaming, her life after her life.

  Maybe I am the way I am

  because she wanted exactly that,

  wanted there to be a woman

  a lot like her, but who would not hold back, so she

  pressed herself, hard, against him,

  pressed and pressed the clear soft

  ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream

  against his stained sour steel grater

  until I came out the other side of his body,

  a tall woman, stained, sour, sharp,

  but with that milk at the center of my nature.

  I lie here now as I once lay

  in the crook of her arm, her creature,

  and I feel her looking down into me the way

  the maker of a sword gazes at his face

  in the steel of the blade.

  After 37 Years My Mother

  Apologizes for My Childhood

  When you tilted toward me, arms out

  like someone trying to walk through a fire,

  when you swayed toward me, crying out you were

  sorry for what you had done to me, your

  eyes filling with terrible liquid like

  balls of mercury from a broken thermometer

  skidding on the floor, when you quietly screamed

  Where else could I turn? Who else did I have?, the

  chopped crockery of your hands swinging toward me, the

  water cracking from your eyes like moisture from

  stones under heavy pressure, I could not

  see what I would do with the rest of my life

  The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window

  someone is bursting into or out of, your

  tiny face glittered as if with

  shattered crystal, with true regret, the

  regret of the body. I could not see what my

  days would be, with you sorry, with

  you wishing you had not done it, the

  sky falling around me, its shards

  glistening in my eyes, your old, soft

  body fallen against me in horror I

  took you in my arms, I said It’s all right,

  don’t cry, it’s all right, the air filled with

  flying glass, I hardly knew what I

  said or who I would be now that I had forgiven you.

  Cambridge Elegy

  (for Henry Averell Gerry, 1941–60)

  I scarcely know how to speak to you now,

  you are so young now, closer to my daughter’s age

  than mine—but I have been there and seen it, and must

  tell you, as the seeing and hearing

  spell the world into the deaf-mute’s hand.

  The dormer windows like the ears of a fox, like the

  double row of teats on a pig, still

  perk up over the Square, though they’re digging up the

  street now, as if digging a grave,

  the shovels shrieking on stone like your car

  sliding on its roof after the crash.

  How I wanted everyone to die if you had to die,

  how sealed into my own world I was,

  deaf and blind. What can I tell you now,

  now that I know so much and you are a

  freshman, still, drinking a quart of orange juice and

  playing three sets of tennis to cure a hangover, such an

  ardent student of the grown-ups! I can tell you

  we were right, our bodies were right, life was

  really going to be that good, that

  pleasurable in every cell.

  Suddenly I remember the exact look of your body, but

  better than the bright corners of your eyes, or the

  light of your face, the rich Long Island

  puppy-fat of your thighs, or the shined

  chino of your pants bright in the corners of my eyes, I

  remember your extraordinary act of courage in

  loving me, something no one but the

  blind and halt had done before. You were

  fearless, you could drive after a sleepless night

  just like a grown-up, and not be afraid, you could

  fall asleep at the wheel easily and

  never know it, each blond hair of your head—and they were

  thickly laid—put out like a filament of light,

  twenty years ago. The Charles still

  slides by with that ease that made me bitter when I

  wanted all things hard as your death was hard,

 
wanted all things broken and rigid as the

  bricks in the sidewalk or your love for me

  stopped cell by cell in your young body.

  Ave—I went ahead and had the children,

  the life of ease and faithfulness, the

  palm and the breast, every millimeter of delight in the body,

  I took the road we stood on at the start together, I

  took it all without you as if

  in taking it after all I could most

  honor you.

  Topography

  After we flew across the country we

  got in bed, laid our bodies

  intricately together, like maps laid

  face to face, East to West, my

  San Francisco against your New York, your

  Fire Island against my Sonoma, my

  New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho

  bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas

  burning against your Kansas your Kansas

  burning against my Kansas, your Eastern

  Standard Time pressing into my

  Pacific Time, my Mountain Time

  beating against your Central Time, your

  sun rising swiftly from the right my

  sun rising swiftly from the left your

  moon rising slowly from the left my

  moon rising slowly from the right until

  all four bodies of the sky

  burn above us, sealing us together,

  all our cities twin cities,

  all our states united, one

  nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

  I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror

  Backwards and upside down in the twilight, that

  woman on all fours, her head

  dangling, and suffused, her lean

  haunches, the area of darkness, the flanks and

  ass narrow and pale as a deer’s and those

  breasts hanging down toward the center of the earth like

  plummets, when I

  swayed from side to side they swayed, it was

  so near night I couldn’t tell if they were yellow or

  violet or rose. I cannot get over her

  moving toward him upside down in the mirror like a

  fly on the ceiling, her head hanging down and her

  tongue long and purple as an anteater’s

  going toward his body, she was clearly a human

  animal, like an Iroquois scout creeping

  naked and noiseless, and when I looked at her