by Sharon Olds
wanted to open the urn as if then
I would finally know him. On the wet lawn,
under the cones cloaked in their rosin, I
worked at the top, it gave and slipped off and
there it was, the actual matter of his being:
small, speckled lumps of bone
like eggs; a discolored curve of bone like a
fungus grown around a branch;
spotted pebbles—and the spots were the channels of his marrow
where the live orbs of the molecules
swam as if by their own strong will
and in each cell the chromosomes
tensed and flashed, tore themselves
away from themselves, leaving their shining
duplicates. I looked at the jumble
of shards like a crushed paper-wasp hive:
was that a bone of his wrist, was that from the
elegant knee he bent, was that
his jaw, was that from his skull that at birth was
flexible yet—I looked at him,
bone and the ash it lay in, chromium-
white as the shimmering coils of dust
the earth leaves behind it, as it rolls, you can
hear its heavy roaring as it rolls away.
Beyond Harm
A week after my father died
suddenly I understood
his fondness for me was safe—nothing
could touch it. In those last months,
his face would sometimes brighten when I would
enter the room, and his wife said
that once, when he was half asleep,
he smiled when she said my name. He respected
my spunk—when they tied me to the chair, that time,
they were tying up someone he respected, and when
he did not speak, for weeks, I was one of the
beings to whom he was not speaking,
someone with a place in his life. The last
week he even said it, once,
by mistake. I walked into his room, and said “How
are you,” and he said, “I love you
too.” From then on, I had
that word to lose. Right up to the last
moment, I could make some mistake, offend him, and with
one of his old mouths of disgust he could re-
skew my life. I did not think of it,
I was helping to take care of him,
wiping his face and watching him.
But then, a while after he died,
I suddenly thought, with amazement, he will always
love me now, and I laughed—he was dead, dead!
The Underlife
Waiting for the subway, looking down
into the pit where the train rides,
I see a section of grey rail de-
tach itself, and move along the packed
silt. It is the first rat I have seen
in years, at first I draw back, but then
I think of my son’s mice and lean forward.
The rat is muscular, ash-grey,
silvery, filth-fluffy. You can see
light through the ears. It moves along the rail, it looks
cautious, domestic, innocent. Back
home, sitting on the bed, I see
a tawny lozenge in the sheet’s pattern
begin to move, and of course it’s a cockroach,
it has lived in all the other great cities
before their razing and after it.
Christ you guys, I address these creatures,
I know about the plates of the earth shifting
over the liquid core, I watched the
bourbon and then the cancer pull my
father under, I know all this. And the
roach and rat turn to me
with the swiveling turn of natural animals, and they
say to me We are not educators,
we come to you from him.
Natural History
When I think about eels, I think about Seattle,
the day I went back to my father’s grave.
I knew we had buried ashes, a box
of oily fluff, and yet, as I approached,
it felt as if the length of him
were slung there, massive, slack,
a six-foot amber eel flung down
deep into the hill. The air was clammy,
greenish as the old Aquarium air when we
would enter from the Zoo. Whenever we saw
a carnivore, my father would offer
to feed me to it—tigers, crocodiles,
manta rays, and that lone moray
eel, it would ripple up to us, armless,
legless, lipless as a grin of terror.
How would you like a tasty girl, my
father would ask the eel, a minister
performing a marriage, How would you like
to get in there with that, he’d lift me up the
thick glass, as if I were rising
on the power of my own scream. Later I would
pass the living room, and see him
asleep, passed out, undulant, lax,
indifferent. And at his grave
it was much like that—
the glossy stone, below it the mashed
bouquet of ashes, and under that,
like a boy who has thrown himself down to cry, the
great, easy, stopped curve
of my father. Length to length I lay on it,
and slept.
The Ferryer
Three years after my father’s death
he goes back to work. Unemployed
for twenty-five years, he’s very glad
to be taken on again, shows up
on time, tireless worker. He sits
in the prow of the boat, sweet cox, turned
with his back to the carried. He is dead, but able
to kneel upright, facing forward
toward the other shore. Someone has closed
his mouth, so he looks more comfortable, not
thirsty or calling out, and his eyes
are open—under the iris, the black
line that appeared there in death. He is calm,
he is happy to be hired, he’s in business again,
his new job is a joke between us and he
loves to have a joke with me, he keeps
a straight face. He waits, naked,
ivory bow figurehead,
ribs, nipples, lips, a gaunt
tall man, and when I bring people
and set them in the boat and push them off
my father poles them across the river
to the far bank. We don’t speak,
he knows that this is simply someone
I want to get rid of, who makes me feel
ugly and afraid. I do not say
the way you did. He knows the labor
and loves it. When I dump someone in, he
does not look back, he takes them straight
to hell. He wants to work for me
until I die. Then, he knows, I will
come to him, get in his boat
and be taken across, then hold out my broad
hand to his, help him ashore, we will
embrace like two who were never born,
naked, not breathing, then up to our chins we will
pull the home blanket of earth and
rest together, at the end of the working day.
I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died
I wanted to be there when my father died
because I wanted to see him die—
and not just to know him, down
to the ground, the dirt of his unmaking, and not
just to give him a last chance
to give me something, or take his old loathing
back. All summer he had gagged, as if trying
to cough his whole esophagus out,
surely his
pain and sorrow had appeased me,
and yet I wanted to see him die
not just to see no soul come
free of his body, no mucal genie of
spirit jump
forth from his mouth,
proving the body on earth is all we have got,
I wanted to watch my father die
because I hated him. Oh, I loved him,
my hands cherished him, laying him out,
but I had feared him so, his lying as if dead on the
couch had seemed to pummel me, an Eve
he took and pressed back into clay,
casual thumbs undoing the cheekbone
eye-socket rib pelvis ankle of the child
and now I watched him be undone and
someone in me gloried in it,
someone lying where he’d lain in chintz
Eden, some corpse girl, corkscrewed like
one of his bourbon spit-ems, smiled.
The priest was well called to that room,
violet grosgrain river of his ribbon laid
down well on that bank of flesh
where the daughter of death was made, it was well to say
Into other hands than ours
we commend this spirit.
Waste Sonata
I think at some point I looked at my father
and thought He’s full of shit. How did I
know fathers talked to their children,
kissed them? I knew. I saw him and judged him.
Whatever he poured into my mother
she hated, her face rippled like a thin
wing, sometimes, when she happened to be near him,
and the liquor he knocked into his body
felled him, slew the living tree,
loops of its grain started to cube,
petrify, coprofy, he was a
shit, but I felt he hated being a shit,
he had never imagined it could happen, this drunken
sleep was a spell laid on him—
by my mother. Well, I left to them
the passion of who did what to whom, it was a
baby in their bed they were rolling over on,
but I could not live with hating him.
I did not see that I had to. I stood
in that living room and saw him drowse
like the prince, in slobbrous beauty, I began
to think he was a kind of chalice,
a grail, his love the goal of a quest,
yes! He was the god of love
and I was a shit. I looked down at my forearm—
whatever was inside there
was not good, it was white stink,
bad manna. I looked in the mirror, and
as I looked at my face the blemishes
arose, like pigs up out of the ground
to the witch’s call. It was strange to me
that my body smelled sweet, it was proof I was
demonic, but at least I breathed out,
from the sour dazed scum within,
my father’s truth. Well it’s fun talking about this,
I love the terms of foulness. I have learned
to get some pleasure from speaking of pain.
But to die, like this. To grow old and die
a child, lying to herself.
My father was not a shit. He was a man
failing at life. He had little shits
traveling through him while he lay there unconscious—
sometimes I don’t let myself say
I loved him, anymore, but I feel
I almost love those shits that move through him,
shapely, those waste foetuses,
my mother, my sister, my brother, and me
in that purgatory.
My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead
I seem to have woken up in a pot-shed,
on clay, on shards, the glitter paths
of slugs kiss-crossing my body. I don’t know
where to start, with this grime on me.
I take the spider glue-net, plug
of the dead, out of my mouth, let’s see
if where I have been I can do this.
I love your feet. I love your knees,
I love your our my legs, they are so
long because they are yours and mine
both. I love your—what can I call it,
between your legs, we never named it, the
glint and purity of its curls. I love
your rear end, I changed you once,
washed the detritus off your tiny
bottom, with my finger rubbed
the oil on you; when I touched your little
anus I crossed wires with God for a moment.
I never hated your shit—that was
your mother. I love your navel, thistle
seed fossil, even though
it’s her print on you. Of course I love
your breasts—did you see me looking up
from within your daughter’s face, as she nursed?
I love your bony shoulders and you know I
love your hair, thick and live
as earth. And I never hated your face,
I hated its eruptions. You know what I love?
I love your brain, its halves and silvery
folds, like a woman’s labia.
I love in you
even what comes
from deep in your mother—your heart, that hard worker,
and your womb, it is a heaven to me,
I lie on its gentle hills and gaze up
at its rosy vault.
I have been in a body without breath,
I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged
chimney, in the air over the earth,
and buried in the earth, and pulled down
into the ocean—where I have been
I understand this life, I am matter,
your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you
I mean look down at your hand, move it,
that action is matter’s love, for human
love go elsewhere.
from The Wellspring
My Parents’ Wedding Night, 1937
Today, I thought of that blood, rippling out
like the blood that seeps up out of the side
of a trout when the pressed-down blade breaks through,
tough salty sweet fish
of my mother’s maidenhead. It was in the dark,
the harsh shantung blinds drawn down, the
ruffled curtains unloosed at the waist.
She was naked with a man for the first time,
the intricate embroidery silks of her
pudenda moist upright alert
terrified, thrilled, each hair
reaching out and curling back, she was
there in the bed like her own parents,
there at the center of the world. Now
she was the loaf laid into the pan
raw and being fed now into the bright oven.
And I thought of my father, over her,
ivory-white face and brilliantine hair,
up on his elbows like a man pulling himself
out of the ocean onto the beach. The war
had not yet begun, they lay and slept
in blood and peace, no one knew what was coming.
I leave them wrapped in that sheet, double larvum,
they sleep with their mouths open like teenagers
in the smell of champagne and cruor and semen,
they rest but I go back and back to that moment,
looking at it until I get more used to it,
like my childhood God watching Adam and Eve in the garden—
the first springing wrinkle of blood, I
see it as a castaway sees the leap of
life pouring out of the turtle’s throat where the shell severs it.
Japanese-American Farmhouse,
California, 1942
Everything has been stolen that anyone
thought worth stealing. The stairs into the grass
are scattered with sycamore leaves curled
like ammonites in inland rock.
Wood shows through the paint on the frame
and the door is open—an empty room,
sunlight on the floor. All that is left
on the porch is the hollow cylinder
of an Alber’s Quick Oats cardboard box
and a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrial
head is bowed, its scrolled neck
glistens. I was born, that day, near there,
in wartime, of ignorant people.
Killing My Sister’s Fish
I picked up the bottle with its gladiator shoulders—
inside its shirred greyish plastic
the ammonia, more muscular than water, pungent—
I poured one dollop, gleaming genie,
into the bowl with my sister’s goldfish
just because they were alive, and she liked them.
It was in the basement, near the zinc-lined sinks
and the ironing board, next to the boiler,
beside the door to the cellar from which
I could get into the crawl space
under the corner of the house, and lie
on the dirt on my back, as if passed out.
I may have been on my way there
when I saw the bowl, and the ammonia curled
for a moment in the air like a spirit. Then I crawled up
under the floor-joists, into the tangent
where the soil curved up, and I lay there,
at the ends of the earth, as if without
regret, as if something set in motion
long before I had been conceived
had been accomplished.
Mrs. Krikorian
She saved me. When I arrived in 6th grade,
a known criminal, the new teacher
asked me to stay after school the first day, she said
I’ve heard about you. She was a tall woman,
with a deep crevice between her breasts,
and a large, calm nose. She said,
This is a special library pass.
As soon as you finish your hour’s work—
that hour’s work that took ten minutes
and then the devil glanced into the room
and found me empty, a house standing open—
you can go to the library. Every hour
I’d zip through the work in a dash and slip out of my
seat as if out of God’s side and sail