by Sharon Olds
playing, now, I felt like someone
small, in a raftered church, or in
a cathedral, the vaulted spaces of the body
like a sacred woods. I was quiet when my throat was not
making those iron, orbital, earth,
rusted, noises at the hinge of matter and
whatever is not matter. He takes me
into the endings like another world at the
center of this one, and then, if he begins to
end when I am resting and I do not rejoin him yet
then I feel awe, I almost feel
fear, sometimes for a moment I feel
I should not move, or make a sound, as
if he is alone, now,
howling in the wilderness,
and yet I know we are in this place
together. I thought, now is the moment
I could become more loving, and my hands moved shyly
over him, secret as heaven,
and my mouth spoke, and in my beloved’s
voice, by the bones of my head, the fields
groaned, and then I joined him again,
not shy, not bold, released, entering
the true home, where the trees bend down along the
ground and yet stand, then we lay together
panting as if saved from some disaster, and for ceaseless
instants, it came to pass what I have
heard about, it came to me
that I did not know I was separate
from this man, I did not know I was lonely.
April, New Hampshire
(for Jane Kenyon and Donald Hall)
Outside the door, a tiny narcissus
had come up through leaf mold. In the living room,
the old butterscotch collie let me
get my hand into the folds
of the mammal, and knead it. Inside their room
Don said, This is it, this is where
we lived and died. To the center of the maple
painted headboard—sleigh of beauty,
sleigh of night—there was an angel affixed
as if bound to it, with her wings open.
The bed spoke, as if to itself,
it sang. The whole room sang,
and the house, and the curve of the hill, like the curve between
a throat and a shoulder, sang, in praising
grief, and the ground, almost, rang,
hollowed-out bell waiting for its tongue
to be lowered in. At the grave site,
next to the big, smoothed, beveled,
felled, oak home, like the bole
of a Druid duir—inside it what comes not
close to being like who she was—
he stood, beside, in a long silence,
minutes, like the seething harness-creaking
when the water of a full watering is feeding
down into the ground, and he looked at us,
at each one, and he seemed not just
a person seeing people, he looked
almost another species, an eagle
gazing at eagles, fierce, intent,
wordless, eyelidless, seeing each one,
seeing deep
into each—
miles, years—he seemed to be Jane,
looking at us for the last time
on earth.
The Untangling
Detritus, in uncorrected
nature, in streambeds or on woods floors,
I have wanted to untangle, soft talon
of moss from twig, rabbit hair
from thorn from down. Often they come
in patches, little mattednesses,
I want to part their parts, trillium-
spadix, mouse-fur, chokecherry-needle,
granite-chip, I want to unbind them and
restore them to their living forms—I am
a housewife of conifer tide-pools, a parent who would
lift parents up off children, lissome
serpent of my mother’s hair discoiled
from within my ear, wall of her tear with-
drawn Red-brown Sea from my hair—she to be
she; I, I. I love
to not know
what is my beloved
and what is I, I love for my I
to die, leaving the slack one, bliss-
pacified, to sleep with him
and wake, and sleep, rageless. Limb
by limb by lip by lip by sex by
sparkle of salt we part, hour by
hour we disentangle and dry,
and then, I relish to reach down
to that living nest that love has woven
bits of feather, and kiss-fleck, and
vitreous floater, and mica-glint, and no
snakeskin into, nectar-caulk and the
solder of sperm and semen dried
to knotted frog-clasps, which I break, gently,
groaning, and the world of the sole one unfastens
up, a lip folded back on itself
unfurls, murmurs, the postilion hairs
crackle, and the thin glaze overall—
glaucous as the pressed brooch
of mucus that quivered upright on my father’s
tongue at death—crazes and shatters,
the garden tendrils out in its rows and
furrows, quaint, dented, archaic,
sweet of all perfume, pansy, peony,
dusk, starry, inviolate.
The Learner
When my mother tells me she has found her late husband’s
flag in the attic, and put it up,
over the front door, for her party,
her voice on the phone is steady with the truth
of yearning, she sounds like a soldier who has known
no other life. For a moment I forget
the fierce one who raised me. We talk about her sweetheart,
how she took such perfect care of him
after his strokes. And when the cancer came,
it was BLACK, she says, and then it was WHITE.
—What? What do you mean? —It was BLACK, it was
cancer, it was terrible,
but he did not know to be afraid, and then it
took him mercifully, it was WHITE.
—Mom, I say, breaking a cold
sweat. Could I say something, and you not
get mad? Silence. I have never said anything
to question her. I’m shaking so the phone
is beating on my jaw. —Yes … —Mom,
people have kind of stopped saying that, BLACK for bad,
WHITE for good. —Well, I’M not a racist,
she says, with some of the plummy, almost sly
pride I have heard in myself. —Well I think
everyone is, Mom, but that’s not
the point—if someone Black heard you,
how would they feel? —But no one Black
is here! she cries, and I say, —Well then think of me
as Black. It’s quiet, then I say, —It’s like some of the
things the kids are always telling me now,
“Mom, nobody says that any
more.” And my mother says, in a soft
voice, with the timing of a dream, —I’ll never
say that any more. And then, almost
anguished, I PROMISE you that I’ll never
say it again. —Oh, Mom, I say, don’t
promise me, who am I,
you’re doing so well, you’re an amazing learner,
and that is when, from inside my mother,
the mother of my heart speaks to me,
the one under the coloratura,
the alto, the woman under the child—who lay
under, waiting, all my life,
to speak—her low voice slowly
undulating, like the flag of her love,
she says, Before, I, die, I am, learning,
things,
I never, thought, I’d know, I am so
fortunate. And then They are things
I would not, have learned, if he, had lived,
but I cannot, be glad, he died, and then
the sound of quiet crying, as if
I hear, near a clearing, a spirit of mourning
bathing itself, and singing.
Heaven to Be
When I’d picture my death, I would be lying on my back,
and my spirit would rise to my belly-skin and out
like a sheet of wax paper the shape of a girl, furl
over from supine to prone and like the djinn’s
carpet begin to fly, low,
over our planet—heaven to be
unhurtable, and able to see without
cease or stint or stopperage,
to lie on the air, and look, and look,
not so different from my life, I would be
sheer with an almost not sore loneness,
looking at the earth as if seeing the earth
were my version of having a soul. But then
I could see my beloved, sort of standing
beside a kind of door in the sky—
not the door to the constellations,
to the pentangles, and borealis,
but a tidy flap at the bottom of the door in the
sky, like a little cat-door in the door,
through which is nothing. And he is saying to me that he must
go, now, it is time. And he does not
ask me, to go with him, but I feel
he would like me with him. And I do not think
it is a living nothing, where nonbeings
can make a kind of unearthly love, I
think it’s the nothing kind of nothing, I think
we go through the door and vanish together.
What depth of joy to take his arm,
pressing it against my breast
as lovers do in a formal walk,
and take that step.
The Tending
My parents did not consider it, for me,
yet I can see myself in the woods of some other
world, with the aborted. It is early evening,
the air is ashen as if from funeral-home
chimneys, and there are beginnings of people
almost growing—but not changing—on stalks,
some in cloaks, or lady’s-slippers,
others on little trellises.
Maybe I am one of the gardeners here,
we water them with salt water.
I recall the girl who had a curl
right in the middle of her forehead,
when she was good she was very very good, I was not like that,
when she was bad she was horrid, I am here
as if in a garden of the horrid—I move
and tend, by attention, to the rows, I think of
Mary Mary Quite Contrary
and feel I am seeing the silver bells
set down clapperless, the cockleshells
with the cockles eaten. And yet this is
a holy woods. When I think of the house
I came to, and the houses these brothers and sisters
might have come to, and what they might have
done with what was done there,
I wonder if some here have done,
by their early deaths, a boon of absence
to someone in the world. So I tend them, I hate
for them to remain thankless. I do not
sign to them—their lullaby
long complete,
I just walk, as if this were a kind of home,
a mothers’ and fathers’ place, and I am
among the sung who will not sing,
the harmed who will not harm.
Psalm
Bending over, at the August table
where the summer towels are kept, putting
a stack on the bottom shelf, I felt his
kiss, in its shock of whiskers, on an inner
curve of that place I know by his knowing,
have seen with the vision of his touch. To be entered
thus, on a hip-high table piled with
sheaves of towels, bath and hand,
terry-cloth eden, is to feel at one’s center
a core of liquid heat as if
one is an earth. Some time later,
we were kissing in near sleep, I think
we did it this time, I whispered, I think
we’re joined at the hip. He has a smile sometimes
from the heart; at this hour, I live in its light.
I gnaw very gently on his jaw, Would you want me to
eat you, in the Andes, in a plane crash, I murmur,
to survive? Yes. We smile. He asks,
Would you want me to eat you to survive? I would love it,
I cry out. We almost sleep, there is a series of
arms around us and between us, in sets,
touches given as if received. Did you think
we were going to turn into each other?, and I get
one of those smiles, as if his face
is a speckled, rubbled, sandy, satiny
cactus-flower eight inches across.
Yes, he whispers. I know he is humoring,
rote sweet-talking. A sliver of late
sun is coming through, between the curtains,
it illumines the scaly surfaces
of my knuckles, its line like a needle held,
to cleanse it, above a match. I move
my wedding finger to stand in the slit
of flame. From the ring’s curve there rises
a fan of borealis fur
like the first instant of sunrise. Do not
tell me this could end. Do not tell me.
The Unswept
Broken bay leaf. Olive pit.
Crab leg. Claw. Crayfish armor.
Whelk shell. Mussel shell. Dogwinkle. Snail.
Wishbone tossed unwished on. Test
of sea urchin. Chicken foot.
Wrasse skeleton. Hen head,
eye shut, beak open as if
singing in the dark. Laid down in tiny
tiles, by the rhyparographer,
each scrap has a shadow—each shadow cast
by a different light. Permanently fresh
husks of the feast! When the guest has gone,
the morsels dropped on the floor are left
as food for the dead—O my characters,
my imagined, here are some fancies of crumbs
from under love’s table.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford and Columbia. Her first book, Satan Says, received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Father was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England. Sharon Olds was the New York State Poet for 1998 to 2000. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University, and helped to found the N.Y.U. workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. Her most recent book, The Unswept Room, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She was the James Merrill Fellow of the Academy of American Poets for 2003 and has just been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She lives in New York City.