Strike Sparks

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.