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Strike Sparks

Page 4

by Sharon Olds

she looked at me so directly, her eyes all

  pupil, her stare said to me I

  belong here, this is mine, I am living out my

  true life on this earth.

  The Moment the Two Worlds Meet

  That’s the moment I always think of—when the

  slick, whole body comes out of me,

  when they pull it out, not pull it but steady it

  as it pushes forth, not catch it but keep their

  hands under it as it pulses out,

  they are the first to touch it,

  and it shines, it glistens with the thick liquid on it.

  That’s the moment, while it’s sliding, the limbs

  compressed close to the body, the arms

  bent like a crab’s cloud-muscle legs, the

  thighs packed plums in heavy syrup, the

  legs folded like the wings of a chicken—

  that is the center of life, the moment when the

  juiced, bluish sphere of the baby is

  sliding between the two worlds,

  wet, like sex, it is sex,

  it is my life opening back and back

  as you’d strip the reed from the bud, not strip it but

  watch it thrust so it peels itself and the

  flower is there, severely folded, and

  then it begins to open and dry

  but by then the moment is over,

  they wipe off the grease and wrap the child in a blanket and

  hand it to you entirely in this world.

  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 find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

  The Month of June: 13½

  As our daughter approaches graduation and

  puberty at the same time, at her

  own, calm, deliberate, serious rate,

  she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her

  hands, thrust out her hipbones, chant

  I’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming

  open around her, a chrysalis cracking and

  letting her out, it falls behind her and

  joins the other husks on the ground,

  7th grade, 6th grade, the

  magenta rind of 5th grade, the

  hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain,

  3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of

  1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and

  kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket

  taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth.

  The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a

  cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her

  jerky sexy child’s joke dance of

  self, self, her throat tight and a

  hard new song coming out of it, while her

  two dark eyes shine

  above her body like a good mother and a

  good father who look down and

  love everything their baby does, the way she

  lives their love.

  Looking at Them Asleep

  When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,

  I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,

  her mouth a little puffed, like one sated, but

  slightly pouted like one who hasn’t had enough,

  her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the

  iris around to face the back of her head,

  the eyeball marble-naked under that

  thick satisfied desiring lid,

  she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,

  and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,

  one knee up as if he is climbing

  sharp stairs, up into the night,

  and under his thin quivering eyelids you

  know his eyes are wide open and

  staring and glazed, the blue in them so

  anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his

  mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb

  and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled

  and pale, his fine fingers curved,

  his hand open, and in the center of each hand

  the dry dirty boyish palm

  resting like a cookie. I look at him in his

  quest, the thin muscles of his arms

  passionate and tense, I look at her with her

  face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,

  content, content—and I know if I wake her she’ll

  smile and turn her face toward me though

  half asleep and open her eyes and I

  know if I wake him he’ll jerk and say Don’t and sit

  up and stare about him in blue

  unrecognition, oh my Lord how I

  know these two. When love comes to me and says

  What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.

  from The Father

  The Glass

  I think of it with wonder now,

  the glass of mucus that stood on the table

  in front of my father all weekend. The tumor

  is growing fast in his throat these days,

  and as it grows it sends out pus

  like the sun sending out flares, those pouring

  tongues. So my father has to gargle, cough,

  spit a mouthful of thick stuff

  into the glass every ten minutes or so,

  scraping the rim up his lower lip

  to get the last bit off his skin, then he

  sets the glass down, on the table, and it

  sits there, like a glass of beer foam,

  shiny and faintly yellow, he gargles and

  coughs and reaches for it again,

  and gets the heavy sputum out,

  full of bubbles and moving around like yeast—

  he is like a god producing food from his own mouth.

  He himself can eat nothing, anymore,

  just a swallow of milk, sometimes,

  cut with water, and even then

  it cannot, always, get past the tumor,

  and the next time the saliva comes up

  it is ropey, he has to roll it in his throat

  a minute to form it and get it up and disgorge

  the oval globule into the

  glass of phlegm, which stood there all day and

  filled slowly with compound globes and I would

  empty it, and it would fill again,

  and shimmer there on the table until

  the room seemed to turn around it

  in an orderly way, a model of the solar system

  turning around the sun,

  my father the old earth that used to

  lie at the center of the universe, now

  turning with the rest of us

  around his death, luminous glas
s of

  spit on the table, these last mouthfuls of his life.

  His Stillness

  The doctor said to my father, “You asked me

  to tell you when nothing more could be done.

  That’s what I’m telling you now.” My father

  sat quite still, as he always did,

  especially not moving his eyes. I had thought

  he would rave if he understood he would die,

  wave his arms and cry out. He sat up,

  thin, and clean, in his clean gown,

  like a holy man. The doctor said,

  “There are things we can do which might give you time,

  but we cannot cure you.” My father said,

  “Thank you.” And he sat, motionless, alone,

  with the dignity of a foreign leader.

  I sat beside him. This was my father.

  He had known he was mortal. I had feared they would have to

  tie him down. I had not remembered

  he had always held still and kept quiet to bear things,

  the liquor a way to keep still. I had not

  known him. My father had dignity. At the

  end of his life his life began

  to wake in me.

  The Lifting

  Suddenly my father lifted up his nightie, I

  turned my head away but he cried out

  Share!, my nickname, so I turned and looked.

  He was sitting in the high cranked-up bed with the

  gown up, around his neck,

  to show me the weight he had lost. I looked

  where his solid ruddy stomach had been

  and I saw the skin fallen into loose

  soft hairy rippled folds

  lying in a pool of folds

  down at the base of his abdomen,

  the gaunt torso of a big man

  who will die soon. Right away

  I saw how much his hips are like mine,

  the lengthened, white angles, and then

  how much his pelvis is shaped like my daughter’s,

  a chambered whelk-shell hollowed out,

  I saw the folds of skin like something

  poured, a thick batter, I saw

  his rueful smile, the cast-up eyes as he

  shows me his old body, he knows

  I will be interested, he knows I will find him

  appealing. If anyone had ever told me

  I would sit by him and he’d pull up his nightie

  and I’d look at his naked body, at the thick

  bud of his glans, his penis in all that

  sparse hair, look at him

  in affection and uneasy wonder

  I would not have believed it. But now I can still

  see the tiny snowflakes, white and

  night-blue, on the cotton of the gown as it

  rises the way we were promised at death it would rise,

  the veils would fall from our eyes, we would know everything.

  The Race

  When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,

  bought a ticket, ten minutes later

  they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors

  had said my father would not live through the night

  and the flight was cancelled. A young man

  with a dark brown moustache told me

  another airline had a nonstop

  leaving in seven minutes. See that

  elevator over there, well go

  down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll

  see a yellow bus, get off at the

  second Pan Am terminal, I

  ran, I who have no sense of direction

  raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish

  slipping upstream deftly against

  the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those

  bags I had thrown everything into

  in five minutes, and ran, the bags

  wagged me from side to side as if

  to prove I was under the claims of the material,

  I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,

  I who always go to the end of the line, I said

  Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said

  Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then

  run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,

  at the top I saw the corridor,

  and then I took a deep breath, I said

  Goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,

  I used my legs and heart as if I would

  gladly use them up for this,

  to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the

  bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed

  in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of

  women running, their belongings tied

  in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my

  long legs he gave me, my strong

  heart I abandoned to its own purpose,

  I ran to Gate 17 and they were

  just lifting the thick white

  lozenge of the door to fit it into

  the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not

  too rich, I turned sideways and

  slipped through the needle’s eye, and then

  I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet

  was full, and people’s hair was shining, they were

  smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a

  mist of gold endorphin light,

  I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,

  in massive relief. We lifted up

  gently from one tip of the continent

  and did not stop until we set down lightly on the

  other edge, I walked into his room

  and watched his chest rise slowly

  and sink again, all night

  I watched him breathe.

  Wonder

  When she calls to tell me my father is dying

  today or tomorrow, I walk down the hall

  and feel that my mouth has fallen open

  and my eyes are staring. The planet of his head

  swam above my crib, I did not understand it.

  His body came toward me in the lake over the agates,

  the hair of his chest lifting like root-hairs—

  I saw it and I did not understand it.

  He lay, behind beveled-glass doors, beside

  the cut-crystal decanter, its future

  shards in upright bound sheaves.

  He sat by his pool, not meeting our eyes,

  his irises made of some boiled-down, viscous

  satiny matter, undiscovered.

  When he sickened, he began to turn to us,

  when he sank down, he shined. I lowered my

  mouth to the glistening tureen of his face

  and he tilted himself toward me, a dazzling

  meteor dropping down into the crib,

  and now he is going to die. I walk down the

  hall, face to face with it,

  as if it were a great heat.

  I feel like one of the shepherd children

  when the star came down onto the roof.

  But I am used to it, I stand in familiar

  astonishment. If I had dared to imagine

  trading, I might have wished to trade

  places with anyone raised on love,

  but how would anyone raised on love

  bear this death?

  The Feelings

  When the intern listened to the stopped heart

  I stared at him, as if he or I

  were wild, were from some other world, I had

  lost the language of gestures, I could not

  know what it meant for a stranger to push

  the gown up along the body of my father.

  My face was wet, my father’s face

  was faintly moist with the sweat of his life,

  the last moments of hard work.

  I was leaning against the wall, in the c
orner, and

  he lay on the bed, we were both doing something,

  and everyone else in the room believed in the Christian God,

  they called my father the shell on the bed, I was the

  only one there who knew

  he was entirely gone, the only one

  there to say goodbye to his body

  that was all he was, I held, hard,

  to his foot, I thought of the Inuit elder

  holding the stern of the death canoe, I

  let him out slowly into the physical world.

  I felt the dryness of his lips under

  my lips, I felt how even my slight

  kiss moved his head on the pillow

  the way things move as if on their own in shallow water,

  I felt his hair rush through my fingers

  like a wolf’s, the walls shifted, the floor, the

  ceiling wheeled as if I was not

  walking out of the room but the room was

  backing away around me. I would have

  liked to stay beside him, ride by his

  shoulder while they drove him to the place where they would

  burn him,

  see him safely into the fire,

  touch his ashes in their warmth, and bring my

  finger to my tongue. The next morning,

  I felt my husband’s body on me

  crushing me sweetly like a weight laid heavy on some

  soft thing, some fruit, holding me

  hard to this world. Yes the tears came

  out like juice and sugar from the fruit—

  the skin thins, and breaks, and rips, there are

  laws on this earth, and we live by them.

  His Ashes

  The urn was heavy, small but so heavy,

  like the time, weeks before he died,

  when he needed to stand, I got my shoulder

  under his armpit, my cheek against his

  naked freckled warm back

  while she held the urinal for him—he had

  lost half his body weight

  and yet he was so heavy we could hardly hold him up

  while he got the fluid out, crackling and

  sputtering like a wet fire. The urn had that

  six-foot heaviness, it began

  to warm in my hands as I held it, under

  the blue fir tree, stroking it.

  The shovel got the last earth

  out of the grave—it must have made that

  kind of gritty iron noise when they

  scraped his ashes out of the grate—

  the others would be here any minute and I

 

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