Strike Sparks

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Strike Sparks Page 9

by Sharon Olds


  have died, our love will live in their children

  and still be here in the arm of the chair,

  locked in it, like the secret structure of matter,

  but what if we ruin everything,

  the earth burning like a human body,

  storms of soot wreathing it

  in permanent winter? Where will love go?

  Will the smoke be made of animal love,

  will the clouds of roasted ice, circling

  the globe, be all that is left of love,

  will the sphere of cold, turning ash,

  seen by no one, heard by no one,

  hold all

  our love? Then love

  is powerless, and means nothing.

  The Protestor

  (for Bob Stein)

  We were driving north, through the snow, you said

  you had turned twenty-one during Vietnam, you were

  1-A. The road curved

  and curved back, the branches laden,

  you said you had decided not to go

  to Canada. Which meant you’d decided to

  go to jail, a slender guy of

  twenty-one, which meant you’d decided to be

  raped rather than to kill, if it was their

  life or your ass, it was your ass.

  We drove in silence, such soft snow

  so heavy borne-down. That was when I’d come to

  know I loved the land of my birth—

  when the men had to leave, they could never come back,

  I looked and loved every American

  needle on every American tree, I thought

  my soul was in it. But if I were taken and

  used, taken and used, I think

  my soul would die, I think I’d be easily broken,

  the work of my life over. And you’d said,

  This is the work of my life, to say,

  with my body itself, You fuckers you cannot

  tell me who to kill. As if there were a

  spirit free of the body, safe from it.

  After a while, you talked about your family,

  not starting, as I had, with

  husband and kids, leaving everyone else out—

  you started with your grandparents

  and worked your way back, away from yourself,

  deeper and deeper into Europe, into

  the Middle East, the holy book

  buried sometimes in the garden, sometimes

  swallowed and carried in the ark of the body itself.

  The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb

  Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t

  have by now.

  Whatever the world is going to do to him

  it has started to do. With a pencil and two

  Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and

  grapes he is on his way, there is nothing

  more we can do for him. Whatever is

  stored in his heart, he can use, now.

  Whatever he has laid up in his mind

  he can call on. What he does not have

  he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one

  folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,

  onto itself, and onto itself, until

  only a triangle wedge remains.

  Whatever his exuberant soul

  can do for him, it is doing right now.

  Whatever his arrogance can do

  it is doing to him. Everything

  that’s been done to him, he will now do.

  Everything that’s been placed in him will

  come out, now, the contents of a trunk

  unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.

  The Talkers

  All week, we talked. Born in the same

  year and hospital we had so much to catch

  up on we couldn’t stop, we talked

  in the morning on the porch, when I combed my hair

  and flung the comb-hair out into the air, and it

  floated down the slope, toward the valley.

  We talked while walking to the car, talked

  over its mild, belled roof,

  while opening the doors, then ducked down

  and there we were, bent toward the interior, talking.

  Meeting, in the middle of the day,

  the first thing when we saw each other

  we opened our mouths. All day,

  we sang to each other the level music

  of spoken language. Even while we ate

  we did not pause, I’d speak to him through

  the broken body of the butter cookie,

  gently spraying him with crumbs. We talked

  and walked, we leaned against the opposite sides of the

  car and talked in the parking lot until

  everyone had driven off, we clung to its

  maroon raft and started a new subject.

  We did not talk about his wife, much,

  or my husband, but to everything else

  we turned the workings of our lips and tongues

  —up to our necks in the hot tub, or

  walking up the steep road,

  stepping into the hot dust as if

  down into the ions of a wing, and on the

  sand, next to each other, as we turned

  the turns that upon each other would have been the

  turnings of joy—even under

  water there trailed from our mouths the delicate

  chains of our sentences. But mostly at night, and

  far into the night, we talked until we

  dropped, as if, stopping for an instant, we might have

  moved right toward each other. Today,

  he said he felt he could talk to me forever,

  it must be the way the angels live,

  sitting across from each other, deep

  in the bliss of their shared spirit. My God,

  they are not going to touch each other.

  First Thanksgiving

  When she comes back, from college, I will see

  the skin of her upper arms, cool,

  matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old

  soupy chest against her breasts,

  I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,

  her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a

  soul in a body. She came into my life the

  second great arrival, fresh

  from the other world—which lay, from within him,

  within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,

  week after week, the moon rising,

  and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months,

  in a steady blur, around our planet.

  Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has

  had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,

  and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult

  to have her in that room again,

  behind that door! As a child, I caught

  bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,

  looked into their wild faces,

  listened to them sing, then tossed them back

  into the air—I remember the moment the

  arc of my toss swerved, and they entered

  the corrected curve of their departure.

  The Native

  This touching of him, on the borders of sleep,

  my sternum and hipbones fitted to his tapered

  back, my lap curled to his buttocks,

  folded around them like a wing with an umber

  eye-spot,

  it feels to me like the most real thing,

  my hand like elements on him, like

  the waters stroking along him inside

  his mother, without language, his large

  eyes unsated ungrieving not even conscious yet,

  the wind traveling the contours of the world,

  a wind that comes when those who loved

  the dead are allowed to touc
h them again. This feels like

  who I am, I am the caressing of him,

  and maybe especially this caressing,

  gentle sweeping at the borders of sex,

  sweeper of its sills in half-sleep, I

  am the curve of his buttock, supple fork-

  lightning of each hair, follicle

  and pore, and the underlying bone,

  the death-god of the skeleton,

  and the intricate, thrilling anus, like a

  character on a landscape, knob-end

  of one of the long drool-bones of the spirit

  running the length of the body, and then—

  but when we cross from the back of the body

  under, then this is over, till the next

  morning or night when it is back again,

  my home, colorless bliss, which I quietly

  walk. I saw it in the Bible, in a sideways

  oval, sepia and white, the hills

  of the peaceable kingdom, its stream and live oak,

  my eyes strolled it, and now my hand

  walks, to and fro in the earth

  and up and down in it, I am opposite-

  Satan, I do not want to rule,

  only to praise. I think I did not

  want to be born,

  I did not want to be conceived,

  I held to nothing, to its dense parental

  fur. Slowly I was pulled away,

  but I would not let go, perhaps they had to

  knock me off with a stick like someone

  clinging to a live, downed wire,

  I came away with the skin of the other

  world on my palms, and at night, when I touch him,

  wander on him, hold to him, and move

  on and hold to him, I feel I am home again.

  The Knowing

  Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise-

  comaed, and woken, we lie a long time

  looking at each other.

  I do not know what he sees, but I see

  eyes of quiet evenness

  and endurance, a patience like the dignity

  of matter. I love the open ocean

  blue-grey-green of his iris, I love

  the curve of it against the white,

  that curve the sight of what has caused me

  to come, when he’s quite still, deep

  inside me. I have never seen a curve

  like that, except our sphere, from outer

  space. I don’t know where he got

  his steadiness as if without self-regard,

  almost without self, and yet

  he chose one woman, instead of the others.

  By knowing him, I get to know

  the purity of the animal

  which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly

  smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing,

  his entire face lit. I love

  to see it change if I cry—there is no worry,

  no pity, a graver radiance. If we

  are on our backs, side by side,

  with our faces turned fully to face each other,

  I can hear a tear from my lower eye

  hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth,

  and then the upper eye’s tears

  braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow

  like the invention of farming, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.

  I am so lucky that I can know him.

  This is the only way to know him.

  I am the only one who knows him.

  When I wake again, he is still looking at me,

  as if he is eternal. For an hour

  we wake and doze, and slowly I know

  that though we are sated, though we are hardly

  touching, this is the coming that the other

  brought us to the edge of—we are entering,

  deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze,

  this place beyond the other places,

  beyond the body itself, we are making

  love.

  from The Unswept Room

  Kindergarten Abecedarian

  I thought what I had to do was to read

  the very long word, over the chalkboard,

  ab-kedev-gi-hij-klem-nop-qurs-

  tuv-wix-yiz, but what I had to do

  was to look at a crescent moon-shape and to go

  k k k k with my mind. It was strange,

  like other things—that a very large Boy owned everything,

  even a fire, where he could put me for the thoughts

  in my head. Each day, I tried to read

  the world, to find his name in it,

  the trees bending in cursive, the bees

  looping their sky script. Crescent moon

  was k-k-k. Cereal bowl

  uh-uh-uh. Cap-gun puh-

  puh-puh. K-k, uh-uh, puh-puh,

  kk-uhh-puhh, kk-uhh-puhh—

  cup. Would God be mad? I had made

  a false cup, in my mind, and although

  he had made my mind, and owned it, maybe this was

  not his cup, maybe he could not

  put this cup in hell, and make it

  scream the cup-scream. Maybe the paper

  world was ours, as the actual one was his—

  I was becoming a reader. For a moment I almost remember it,

  when I stood back, on the other side

  of the alphabet, a-b-c-d-

  e-f-g, and took that first

  step in, h-i-j-k

  l-m-n-o-p, and stood astride

  the line of the border of literacy,

  q-r-s, t-u-v,

  I would work for a life of this, I would ask

  sanctuary: w, x, y, z.

  Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.

  After Marcus Licinius Crassus

  defeated the army of Spartacus,

  he crucified 6,000 men.

  That is what the records say,

  as if he drove in the 18,000

  nails himself. I wonder how

  he felt, that day, if he went outside

  among them, if he walked that human

  woods. I think he stayed in his tent

  and drank, and maybe copulated,

  hearing the singing being done for him,

  the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one

  remove, to the six-thousandth power.

  And maybe he looked out, sometimes,

  to see the rows of instruments,

  his orchard, the earth bristling with it

  as if a patch in his brain had itched

  and this was his way of scratching it

  directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,

  and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,

  and now had found redress for it,

  and voice for it. I speak as a monster,

  someone who today has thought at length

  about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling

  nothing while so much is being

  felt, his hot lightness of spirit

  in being free to walk around

  while other are nailed above the earth.

  It may have been the happiest day

  of his life. If he had suddenly cut

  his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would

  have woken up to what he was doing.

  It is frightening to think of him suddenly

  seeing what he was, to think of him running

  outside, to try to take them down,

  one man to save 6,000.

  If he could have lowered one,

  and seen the eyes when the level of pain

  dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,

  wouldn’t that have opened in him

  the wild terror of understanding

  the other? But then he would have had

  5,999

  to go. Probably it almost never

  happens, that a Marcus Crassus

  wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused

  to his l
iving dream, lifted the flap

  and stood and looked out, at the rustling, creaking

  living field—his, like an external

  organ, a heart.

  5¢ a Peek

  The day my class was to go to the circus,

  I sidled into the bathroom, early,

  and stood on tiptoe, up into the bottom

  corner of the mirror, and leaned on the sink,

  and slowly cut off my eyelashes

  down close to the eyelid. I had no idea what I was

  doing, or why, I studied the effect

  —not bad, a little stark—but when I saw the effect

  on my mother, not just anger, but pity

  and horror, I was interested.

  I think I had almost given up on being

  a girl, on trying to grow up to be a woman like my mother,

  I wanted to get disadopted

  and go home to be the baby with the calf’s head,

  home to my birth-mother the bearded lady,

  my father the sword swallower stopped mid-swallow,

  one with the sword. I had tried to act normal,

  but when the inspiration came

  I felt I was meant to act on it,

  to look at my mom with my gaze trimmed to a seer’s

  and see her see me for an instant, see

  her irises contract. I did not

  imagine I could ever leave my mother,

  mostly I was her, in distorted form,

  but at least for that second the itsy scissors

  spoke to her with their birdy beak,

  skreeek, skreeek, witch whinge. And when

  my lashes grew back, no thicker no thinner no

  shorter no longer, my mother sat me

  down, and taught me to bat them, to look

  sidelong, blindly, and shudder them at seven beats a second.

  Grey Girl

  (for Yusef Komunyakaa and Toi Derricotte)

  We were walking down Park, on the grates over

  the exhaust ducts of the lavish apartments,

  we were walking on air, on iron bars,

  three abreast—four breasts,

  two on either side of the man

  who had survived through various wars,

  my friend and I proud to walk him through the

  evening after his reading. Our skirts

  faffled, we were tall, we were his color guard, his

  woman of color and woman of no

  color guard, we were talking about

  family and race, and a greed or lust

  rose in me to talk about

  disliking myself. I was crouching slightly,

 

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