by Sharon Olds
clothed, her face lit up with sarcastic
wonder, and combat. I did not speak, she came
toward me, I bolted, threw open her door,
slamming my brother to the floor with a keyhole
shiner, I poured down the staircase and through
some rooms, and got my back against
a wall, I would hurt her before the last scene
of this long-running act could be played out
to its completion. When she got there, maybe she could see that,
we faced off, dressed in our dresses and our
secret straps and pulleys, and then
I walked away—and for the year I remained
in that house, each month our bodies called
to each other, brought each other bleeding off in the
waste of the power of creation.
Home Theater, 1955
They weren’t armadillos, or sow bugs,
or nautili, the animals printed on the
seersucker cotton of my nightie, maybe they were
rabbits, or deer. There was a new style,
that year, the shortie nightie, no longer
than the hem of its matching panties—and on its
cloth no eels, no trilobites,
no oviraptors, but goldfish and pigs
placed in rows like sown seeds.
That night, what was supposed to be
inside our father’s head—the arterial
red—had emerged and cooled on his brow,
cheeks, mouth, into a Comus mask,
and the police were there, and our mother was not. It was
like a Greek play, in a stone
amphitheater, with very few characters—
first the one in blood disguise,
then the elder daughter who
had called the two officers
to our home—they were not much older than she, they were
dressed for the hour in midnight blue.
And my sister’s torso, in its shortie, in the kitchen,
seemed to be almost rippling,
swaying like an upright snake still
half in its basket. Then, for an instant,
I thought I saw the younger cop just
glance at my legs and away, once
and away, and for a second, the little
critters on my nightie seemed to me to be
romping as if in an advertisement.
Soon after our father had struck himself down,
there had risen up these bachelors
beside the sink and stove, and the tiny
mastodons, and bison, and elk, the
beasts on my front and back, began,
atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant.
Paterfamilias
In the evenings, during the cocktail hour,
my mother’s new husband would sometimes inspect
the troops. Your mother has the best damn fanny
in the house, he would say to my sister and me—in our
teens, then twenties, thirties, forties. Turn
around! he’d cry out, Turn around! We wouldn’t
turn around, and he’d say, Your mother has the nicest little
ass in the house. And let’s look at those legs,
he’d shout, and she’d flash her gams. Your mother
has the only decent legs in the house,
he’d growl. And when I’d pass him next,
he’d bear-hug me, as if to say
No hard feelings, and hit me hard
on the rear, and laugh very loud, and his eyes seemed to
shine as I otherwise never saw them shine,
like eyes of devils and fascists in horror
comic books. Then he’d freshen his Scotch, and just
top hers up, a little, and then
he’d show us his backwards-curled, decurved
Hohenzollern thumb—Go on,
touch it! Touch it! They were people who almost
did not know any better, who, once
they found each other, were happy, and felt,
for the first time, as if they belonged
on earth—maybe owned it, and every creature on it.
Easter 1960
The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his
first rotation in the emergency room.
On the ancient boarding-school radio,
in the attic hall, the announcer had given my
boyfriend’s name as one of two
brought to the hospital after the sunrise
service, the egg-hunt, the crash—one of them
critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the
stairwell banisters, at their lathing,
the necks and knobs like joints and bones,
the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said
Which one of them died, and now the world was
an ant’s world: the huge crumb of each
second thrown, somehow, up onto
my back, and the young, tired voice
said my fresh love’s name. It would have been
nice to tear out the balusters, and rail, and the
stairs, like a big backbone out of a
brontosaur, to take some action,
to do, and do, and do, as a done-to, and
dear one to a done-to-death-to, to have run, on a
treadmill, all night, to light the dorm,
the entire school, with my hate of fate,
and blow its wiring, and the town’s wiring,
pull the wires of Massachusetts
out of the switchboard of the country. I went back to my
room, I did not know how to get
out of the world, or how to stay—
I sat on the floor with the Sunday Times
and read the columns of the first page down,
and then the next, and then the next.
I can still see how every a,
initiator of his given name,
looked eager—it hadn’t heard, yet, that its
boy was gone—and every f
hung down its head on its broken neck,
its little arms held out, as if to
say, You see me, this is what I am.
PART THREE: Umbilicus
Umbilicus
When she was first in the air, upside down,
it linked us, the stem on which she had blossomed.
And they tied a knot in it, finishing
the work of her making. The limp remnant—
vein, and arteries, and Jelly of Wharton—had
lived as it would shrivel, by its own laws,
in a week it would wither away, while the normal
fetal holes in her heart closed,
the foramen ovale shutting the passage
the placental blood had swept, when her lungs,
flat in their dog-eared wet, had slept.
I was in shock, my life as I had known it
over. When they sent us home, they said
to bathe the stump in alcohol
twice a day. I was stone afraid,
and yet she was so interesting—
moist, doubled-up, wondering, undersea
being. And the death-nose at the belly-center wizened
and pizzled and ginsenged and wicked-witch’d until
the morning I undid her pajamas, and there, in the
night’s cereus petals, lay her stamen,
in its place on her the folded tent,
imbliu, nabhila, nafli, at last
purely hers, toward the womb an eye now
sightless, now safe in moated memory.
When Our Firstborn Slept In
My breasts hardening with milk—little seeps
leaking into the folded husband
hankies set into the front curves
of the nursing harness—I would wander around
the quiet apartment when her nap would last a little
longe
r than usual. When she was awake, I was
purpose, I was a soft domestic
prowling of goodness—only when she slept
was I free to think the thoughts of one
in bondage. I had wanted to be someone—not just
someone’s mom, but someone, some one.
Yet I know that this work that I did with her
lay at the heart of what mattered to me—was
that heart. And still there was a part of me
left out by it, as if exposed on a mountain
by mothering. And when she slept in,
I smelled the husks of olive rind
on that slope, I heard the blue knock
of the eucalyptus locket nut, I
tasted the breath of the wolf seeking
the flesh to enrich her milk, I saw the
bending of the cedar under the sea
of the wind—while she slept, it was as if
my pierced ankles loosed themselves
and I walked like a hunter in the horror-joy
of the unattached. Girl of a mother,
mother of a girl, I paced, listening,
almost part-fearing, sometimes, that she might have stopped
breathing, knowing nothing was anything, for me,
next to the small motions as she woke,
light and wind on the face of the water.
And then that faint cry, like a
pelagic bird, who sleeps in flight, and I would
turn, pivot on a spice-crushing heel,
and approach her door.
Toth Farry
In the back of the drawer, in the sack, the baby
canines and incisors are mostly chaff,
by now, no whole utensils left:
half an adze; half a shovel—in its
handle, a marrow well of the will
to dig and bite. And the enamel hems
are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go
from salt, to pee on snow. One cuspid
is like the tail of an ivory chough,
I think it’s our daughter’s, but the dime hermes
mingled the chompers of our girl and boy, safe-
keeping them together with the note that says
Der Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me
A Bag Of Moany. I pore over the shards
like a skeleton lover—but who could throw out
these short pints of osseous breast-milk,
or the wisdom, with its charnel underside,
and its dome, smooth and experienced,
ground in anger, rinsed in silver
when the mouth waters. From above, its knurls
are a cusp-ring of mountaintops
around an amber crevasse, where in high
summer the summit wildflowers open
for a day—Crown Buttercup, Alpine Flames,
Shooting Star, Rosy Fairy Lantern,
Cream Sacs, Sugar Scoop.
Home Ec
It is an art, a craft, a kind of Home
Ec, slowly pulling out the small
rubber dome, this time almost
full of blackish blood. It is
like war, or surgery, without weapons
or instruments. The darkness of it
has the depth of truth. The clots are shocking and
thrilling in their shapes. I do what some
might do in their last days, knowing they will
never have another chance,
I rub my palms with it, and I want
to go across my face once, in ritual
streaks, but my glasses are on, and I’m in
a slight panic, seeing my reddened
life-lines. For a moment, while I still can,
I want to eat a dot of it,
but not the bitterness of spermicide,
or a sperm dead of spermicide.
Many millions have been killed today—
I hold my hands out to the mirror
over the sink, a moment, like a killer
showing her nature. Then left hand
to hot, right to cold, I turn on
the taps. And blood turns out to be flecks
suspended in water, the washy down
of a red hen. I feel that the dead
would be glad to come back for one moment of this,
in me the dead come back for a moment
to the honor and glory.
The Space Heater
On the ten-below-zero day, it was on,
the round-shouldered heater near the analyst’s couch,
at its end, like the child’s headstone which appeared
a year later, in the neighboring plot, near
the foot of my father’s grave. And it was hot, with the
laughing satire of a fire’s heat,
the little coils like hairs in Hell.
And it was making a group of sick noises—
I wanted the doctor to turn it off
but I couldn’t seem to ask, so I just
stared, but it did not budge. The doctor
turned his heavy, soft palm
outward, toward me, inviting me to speak, I
said, “If you’re cold—are you cold? But if it’s on
for me …” He held his palm out toward me,
I tried to ask, but I only muttered,
but he said, “Of course,” as if I had asked,
and he stood and approached the heater, and then
stood on one foot, and threw himself
toward the wall with one hand, and with the other hand
reached down behind the couch, to pull
the plug out. I looked away,
I had not known he would have to bend
like that. And I was so moved, that he
would act undignified, to help me,
that I cried, not trying to stop, but as if
the moans made sentences which bore
some human message. If he would cast himself toward the
outlet for me, as if bending with me
in some old shame, then I would put my trust
in his art—and the heater purred, like a creature
or the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,
the father of a child, the spirit of a father,
the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,
the heat of vision, the power of the heat,
the pleasure of the power.
Barbarous Artifacts
The execution building at each
prison is nicknamed after the
equipment it houses.
In a pan of Joy and cold boiled water
lay the gloves I’d picked up, for some reason, off the street, in the sleet—
one large left, one huge right,
like gauntlets of centurions. I ran
in more hot, and coils of wool
surged out, tar pellets, facets of glass,
and there at the bottom was the six-inch spike I had
lifted from the excavation site.
And the spike was too heavy for its four-sided length
and thickness, like a piece of railroad steel
sixteen ounces on its home planet,
16 tons here. It had
a wavy shape, as if poured when hot, and we have
heard the scream when such a nail
is pulled from a human hoof. And the shaft looked
bitten, and the tip curled up like a talon,
and the head was bent down and dented. It looked old
as Rome, and the right size, but Jesus’s
hands would have torn right through, they had nailed him
by his wrists, they didn’t have the chair, yet,
with its scarlet cap, they didn’t have the ovens
for him and his family. I set the gloves
on the daily news, to dry—one lost from one
worker, one lost from another, a left
and a right, the way we are in this together.
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What a piece of work is man,
in Albany, and Washington,
in Texas, and in Louisiana, at
Angola, in the Red Hat House.
Animal Dress
The night before she went back to college,
she went through my sweater drawer, so when she left she was in
black wool, with maroon creatures
knitted in, an elk branched across her
chest, a lamb on her stomach, a cat,
an ostrich. Eighteen, she was gleaming with a haze
gleam, a shadow of the glisten of her birth
when she had taken off my body—that thick coat, cast
off after a journey. In the elevator
door window, I could see her half-profile—
strong curves of her face, like the harvest
moon, and when she pressed 1,
she set. Hum and creak of her descent,
the backstage cranking of the solar system,
the lighted car sank like a contained
calm world. Eighteen years
I had been a mother! In a way now I was past it—
resting, watching our girl bloom.
And then she was on the train, in her dress
like a zodiac, her body covered with
the animals that carried us in their
bodies for a thousand centuries
of sex and death, until flesh knew itself, and spoke.
Royal Beauty Bright
After her toxic shock, my mother tried to
climb out of bed in the I.C.U.—half
over the rails, she’d dangle, the wires and
tubes holding her back, I.V.,
oxygen, catheter, blood-pressure cuff,
heart monitor—streaming with strings,
she’d halt, ninety pounds, and then she’d
haul, and the wires and tubes would go taut
and start to rip. So they tied her down,
first her chest in a soft harness,
strapped around the mattress, then her wrists
with long, sterile gauze ribbons,
to the bars of the bed, then, when she kicked until
she raised blue baby-fist welts on her ankles they
put her in five-point. I stood by the bed while she
bucked and tugged, she slowly raised her
head and shoulders like the dead, she called in a
hoarse, cold baritone,
Untie my hands. I sat by the rails,
she was fixed like a constellation to the bed,