by Sharon Olds
spider-dancing over hot air, and I
said, You want to know about white people?
I’ll tell you about white people,
I lived in close proximity to them
and I was them, that meanness they used on me
was what I was made of. Out of the corner of my
eye, I glimpsed myself for a second
in a store window, a swirl of grey, a
thirster after substance. My companions became
quiet, as if they had pulled back,
a bit, and were holding still, with wary
courtesy. In that second, I could almost
sense myself, whuffolk amok,
one who wanted to win something
in the war of the family, to rant in the faces
of the war-struck about her home-front pain.
It is hard to see oneself as dangerous
and stupid, but what I had said was true,
the people who had hurt me most were my makers,
but there had not been what I saw now as a ring
of haters around us, encircling us.
I had a flash of knowledge of this
on the sidewalk—as we kept going, I sensed
two, living beings, and one half-
idiot, a grey girl walking. Who did she
think she was, to relish herself
for hating herself, to savor, proudly,
the luxury of hating her own people?
All evening, I looked at my friends’
womanly beauty, and manly beauty,
and the table with its wines, and meats, and fruits,
and flowers, as if we could go back to the beginning.
Still Life in Landscape
It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and
half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright,
a woman was lying on the highway, on her back,
with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders
so the back of her head touched her spine
between her shoulder blades, her clothes
mostly accidented off, and her
leg gone, a tall bone
sticking out of the stub of her thigh—
this was her abandoned matter,
my mother grabbed my head and turned it and
clamped it into her chest, between
her breasts. My father was driving—not sober
but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of
neutral twilight, broken glass
on wet black macadam, an underlying
midnight abristle with stars. This was
the world—maybe the only one.
The dead woman was not the person
my father had recently almost run over,
who had suddenly leapt away from our family
car, jerking back from death,
she was not I, she was not my mother,
but maybe she was a model of the mortal,
the elements ranged around her on the tar—
glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.
The Wedding Vow
I did not stand at the altar, I stood
at the foot of the chancel steps, with my beloved,
and the minister stood on the top step
holding the open Bible. The church
was wood, painted ivory inside, no people—God’s
stable perfectly cleaned. It was night,
spring—outside, a moat of mud,
and inside, from the rafters, flies
fell onto the open Bible, and the minister
tilted it and brushed them off. We stood
beside each other, crying slightly
with fear and awe. In truth, we had married
that first night, in bed, we had been
married by our bodies, but now we stood
in history—what our bodies had said,
mouth to mouth, we now said publicly,
gathered together, death. We stood
holding each other by the hand, yet I also
stood as if alone, for a moment,
just before the vow, though taken
years before, took. It was a vow
of the present and the future, and yet I felt it
to have some touch on the distant past
or the distant past on it, I felt
the wordless, dry, crying ghost of my
parents’ marriage there, somewhere
in the echoing space—perhaps one of the
plummeting flies, bouncing slightly
as it hit forsaking all others, then was brushed
away. I felt as if I had come
to claim a promise—the sweetness I’d inferred
from their sourness, and at the same time that I
had come, congenitally unworthy, to beg.
And yet, I had been working toward this hour
all my life. And then it was time
to speak—he was offering me, no matter
what, his life. That is all I had to
do, that evening, to accept the gift
I had longed for—to say I had accepted it,
as if being asked if I breathe. Do I take?
I do. I take as he takes—we have been
practicing this. Do you bear this pleasure? I do.
His Costume
Somehow I never stopped to notice
that my father liked to dress as a woman.
He had his sign language about women
talking too much, and being stupid,
but whenever there was a costume party
he would dress like us, the tennis balls
for breasts—balls for breasts—the pageboy
blond wig, the lipstick, he would sway
his body with moves of gracefulness
as if one being could be the whole
universe, its ends curving back to come
up from behind it. Six feet, and maybe
one-eighty, one-ninety, he had the shapely
legs of a male Grable—in a short
skirt, he leaned against a bookcase pillar
nursing his fifth drink, gazing
around from inside his mascara purdah
with those salty eyes. The woman from next door
had a tail and ears, she was covered with Reynolds Wrap,
she was Kitty Foil, and my mother was in
a teeny tuxedo, but he always won
the prize. Those nights, he had a look of daring,
as if he was getting away with something,
a look of triumph, of having stolen
back. And as far as I knew, he never threw
up as a woman, or passed out, or made
those signals of scorn with his hands, just leaned,
voluptuous, at ease, deeply
present, as if sensing his full potential, crossing
over into himself, and back,
over and back.
First Weeks
Those first weeks, I hardly knew how to
love our daughter. Her face looked crushed,
crumpled with worry—and not even
despairing, but just disheartened, a look of
endurance. The skin of her face was finely
wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,
she looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,
tranced. And smallish, 6.13,
wizened—she looked as if she were wincing
away from me without moving. The first
moment I had seen her, my glasses off,
in the delivery room, a blur of blood
and blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,
upside down, and they righted her, and there
came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her
whole body flushed rose.
When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,
someone else had cleaned her, wiped
the inside of my body off her
and combed her hair in narrow scary
plough-lines. She was ten days early,
sleepy, the breast engorged, standing out nearly
even with the nipple, her lips would so much as
approach it, it would hiss and spray.
And when we took her home, she shrieked
and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,
and when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite
anxiously. I didn’t blame her,
she’d been born to my mother’s daughter. I would kneel
and gaze at her, and pity her.
All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,
and napped, and nursed, and walked her. And then,
one day, she looked at me, as if
she knew me. She lay along my forearm, fed, and
gazed at me as if remembering me,
as if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting
her memory back. When she smiled at me,
delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,
I fell in love, I became human.
The Clasp
She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for almost a
second, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even nearly
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing, the
expression, into her, of my anger,
“Never, never again,” the righteous
chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very
fast—grab, crush, crush,
crush, release—and at the first extra
force, she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me—yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me. This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love
was this.
Diaphragm Aria
It’s curious and sweet to slip it out
and look inside, to see what’s there,
like a treasure hunt, dimestore toys
and dolls tucked into the root-floor of the woods,
or tilt up a stone in the yard and find,
in the groove of her path, the flame-brown newt. Now I
read the shallow cup of dregs,
shreds like clothes torn away in
eagerness, cloth of the bodies, which rips
to a cloud of threads. Here our daughter
never picked her finicky way,
here our son never somersaulted,
here only our not-children
advanced, and dropped, and surged forward
and were cut down, there a coil
of tail, here a ladyfinger, a
curl, a bone of the twin. When I have reached
into myself, and glistened out the dome,
I search its planetarium sky
for its weather, ivory nimbus, reach
of summer showers—these are the heavens
under which the grateful bodies
went to earth, dense with contentment,
moving, together, for those hour-long
moments, in a mattery paradise,
I gaze into the cumulus
of spermicide, I bless the lollers who
stay in that other sphere as we come
like surf on the shore of it.
The Window
Our daughter calls me, in tears—like water
being forced, under great pressure, from densest
stone. I am mad at you, she whispers.
You said in a poem that you’re a survivor,
that’s O.K., but you said that you are
a Jew, when you’re not, that’s so cheap. You’re right,
I say, you’re so right. Did you see the Holocaust
movie, she asks, in a stifled voice,
there’s a window on the third floor of the barracks
and I know it’s a little bathroom, I used it
in Poland the day I was there, and she sobs,
a sound like someone swallowing gravel.
And the rooms hadn’t been dusted, it was
as if everything was left as it was,
and some of the same molecules
might be there in the room. And there were exhibit cases,
one with hair—hair. In my mind
I see the landscape, behind glass,
the human hills and mountains, the intimate
crowning of a private life
now a case of clouds, detritus,
meshes. And there were eyeglasses,
a huge pile of liking to read,
and of liking books, and being able to see, and
then … then there was a display case
of suitcases, and an Orthodox guide was
taking a tour through. She is able, while she cries,
to speak, in a compressed, stopped-down voice
as if a pebble could talk. He was telling
a big class of Bar Mitzvah boys
to look at the names on the suitcases—
some of them had believed … they were going …
on vacation, she says—or something like it.
I cannot hear each word
but sometimes just the creak of rock
on water. I do not want to ask her
to repeat. She seems to be saying she had to
leave the room, to find a place
to cry in, maybe the little bathroom,
I feel as if I am there, near her,
and am seeing, through her, the horror of the human,
as if she is transparent, holding
no gaze to herself. There were people not
crying, just looking, she says, then she says
so much about us is unbearable.
We talk an hour, we are coming back
up as if from inside the ground,
I try to tell her it was not weakness
in her, that it was love she felt,
the helplessness of each life, and the
dread of our species. Yeah yeah, she says,
in the low voice of someone lately
the young in the nest, maybe soon
the nesting one—and that hour, within
her view, the evidence of the wish
that the ark be consumed—and no thought of herself
to distract her, nothing distracts her, not even
the breathing of her own body as she sees.
Fish Oil
One midnight, home late from work,
the apartment reeked of fish boiled
in oil. All the windows were shut,
and all the doors were open—up
from the pan and spatula rose a thick
helix of cod and olive. My husband
slept. I opened the windows and shut
the doors and put the plates in the sink
and oodled Palmolive all over. The next
day I fishwifed to a friend, and she said,
Someone might live with that, and come to
love the smell of a fry. And that evening,
I looked at my beloved, and who he is
touched me in the core of my heart. I sought
a bottle of extra-extra virgin,
and a recipe for sea fillet in
olive-branch juice, I filled the rooms with
swirls of finny perfume, the outlines
in the sand the early Christians drew,
the loop meaning safety, meaning me too,
I remembered my paren
ts’ frowns at any
whiff of savor outside the kitchen,
the Calvinist shudder, in that house, at the sweet
grease of life. I had come to my mate
a shocked being, agog, a salt
dab in his creel, girl in oil,
his dish. I had not known that one
could approve of someone entirely—one could
wake to the pungent day, one could awake
from the dream of judgment.
Wonder as Wander
At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,
my mother potters around her house.
Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one
there, no one to tell what to do,
she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,
fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly
throws out her arms and screams—high notes
lying here and there on the carpets
like bodies touched by a downed wire,
she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through
the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.
I feel, now, that I do not know her,
and for all my staring, I have not seen her
—like the song she sang, when we were small,
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,
for poor lonely people, like you, and like I
—on the slow evenings alone, when she delays
and delays her supper, walking the familiar
halls past the mirrors and night windows,
I wonder if my mother is tasting a life
beyond this life—not heaven, her late
beloved is absent, her father absent,
and her staff is absent, maybe this is earth
alone, as she had not experienced it,
as if she is one of the poor lonely people,
as if she is born to die. I hold fast
to the thought of her, wandering in her house,
a luna moth in a chambered cage.
Fifty years ago, I’d squat in her
garden, with her Red Queens, and try
to sense the flyways of the fairies as they kept
the pollen flowing on its local paths,
and our breaths on their course of puffs—they kept
our eyes wide with seeing what we
could see, and not seeing what we could not see.
The Shyness
Then, when we were joined, I became
shyer. I became completed, joyful,
and shyer. I may have shone more, reflected
more, and from deep inside there rose
some glow passing steadily through me, but I was not