by Sharon Olds
and I sang to her, while the Valium
did nothing, not the first shot
or the second, I went through the old carols as she
squirmed and writhed, five-pointed flesh that
gave me life, and when the morphine took her,
I sang her down—Star of wonder,
Star of night.
Self-Exam
They tell you it won’t make much sense, at first,
you will have to learn the terrain. They tell you this
at thirty, and fifty, and some are late
beginners, at last lying down and walking
the bright earth of the breasts—the rounded,
cobbled, ploughed field of one,
with a listening walking, and then the other—
fingertip-stepping, divining, north
to south, east to west, sectioning
the low, fallen hills, sweeping
for mines. And the matter feels primordial,
unimaginable—dense,
cystic, phthistic, each breast like the innards
of a cell, its contents shifting and changing,
streambed gravel under walking feet, it
seems almost unpicturable, not
immemorial, but nearly un-
memorizable, but one marches,
slowly, through grave or fatal danger,
or no danger, one feels around in the
two tackroom drawers, ribs and
knots like leather bridles and plaited
harnesses and bits and reins,
one runs one’s hands through the mortal tackle
in a jumble, in the dark, indoors. Outside–
night, in which these glossy ones were
ridden to a froth of starlight, bareback.
The Riser
When I heard that my mother had stood up after her near
death of toxic shock, at first
I could not get that supine figure in my
mind’s eye to rise, she had been so
flat, her face shiny as the ironing board’s
gray asbestos cover. Once my
father had gone that horizontal, he did
not lift up, again, until he was
fire. But my mother put her fine legs
over the side, got her soles
on the floor, slowly poured her body from the
mattress into the vertical, she
stood between nurse and husband, and they let
go, for a second—alive, upright,
my primate! When I’d last seen her, she was silver
and semi-liquid, like something ladled
onto the sheet, early form
of shimmering life, amoeba or dazzle of
jism, and she’d tried to speak, like matter
trying to speak. Now she stands by the bed,
gaunt, slightly luminous, the
hospital gown hanging in blue
folds, like the picture of Jesus-come-back
in my choir book. She seemed to feel close to Jesus,
she loved the way he did not give up,
nothing could stop his love, he stood there
teetering beside the stone bed and he
folded his grave-clothes.
Wooden Ode
Whenever I see a chair like it,
I consider it: the no arms,
the lower limbs of pear or cherry.
Sometimes I’ll take hold of the back slat
and lift the four-legged creature off the floor to hear
the joints creak, the wind in the timbers,
hauling of keel rope. And the structure will not
utter, just some music of reed and tether,
Old Testament cradle. Whenever I see
a Hitchcock chair—not a Federal,
or an Eames—I pay close, furniture
attention, even as my mind is taking its
seablind cartwheels back. But if every
time you saw a tree—pear,
cherry, American elm, American
oak, beech, bayou cypress—
your eyes checked for a branch, low enough
but not too low, and strong enough,
and you thought of your uncle, or father, or brother,
third cousin twice removed
murdered on a tree, then you would have
the basis for a working knowledge of American History.
The Scare
There was a cut clove of garlic, under
a glass tumbler, there were spoons tarnished opal
in a cup, there was a nesting bowl
in a nesting bowl in a nesting bowl
on the sill, when I understood there was a chance they might
have to remove my womb. I bent over,
wanting to cry out, It’s my best friend, it’s like
having a purse of your own, of yourself, it’s like
being where you came from, as if you are your origin,
the basket of life, the withies, the osier
reed weave, where your little best beloveds
lay and took heart, took on the weights
and measures. I love the pear shape,
the upside-downness, the honor of bringing
forth the living so new they can almost
not be said to be dying yet.
And the two who rested, without fear or elation,
against the endometrium,
over the myometrium, held
around by the serosa … In the latter days,
the unclosed top of the precious head pressed
down on the inner os, and down on the
outer os, and the feet played up against
the fundus, and I could feel, in myself—
of myself—the tale of love’s flesh.
Soon enough, the whole small
city of my being will demolish—what if now
one dwelling, the central dwelling,
the holy-seeming dwelling, might go. Like a fiber
suitcase, in a mown field, it stands,
its worn clasps gleaming.
Pansy Coda
When I see them, my knees get a little weak.
I have to squat down close to them, I
want to put my face in one of them.
They are so buttery, and yet so clean.
They have a kind of soaking-wet dryness,
they have the tremulous chin, and the pair of
ocular petals, and the pair of frail
ear petals, the sweet dog face.
Or is it like the vulva of a woman,
or of some particular woman. My mother
tended them—purple-black—
when I kneel to them I am kneeling to my mother,
who quietly shows her body to me
whenever it can be done with the slightest pretense of dignity,
as if it might be a pleasure to me.
She’ll call to me, and when I come to her door
she’ll walk across her room slowly,
eyes focused in front of her feet
but the corners of her eyes alert. She is so lonely
since her husband died, she just wants to be
naked in a room with someone, anyone,
but her face has something eerie in its blankness,
the eyes kept rounded—I have no idea
what she is thinking, I get that nervous feeling
I’ve had all my life around my mother. But when I
see a bed of these, I kneel,
and gaze at each one, freshly and freshly wowed,
I love to run my thumb softly
over the gentle jaw, I would like
to wrap myself in a cloak of them,
a cloak of one if it were large enough.
I am tired of hating myself, tired
of loathing. I want to be carried in a petal
sling, sling of satin and cream,
I want to be dazed, I want the waking sleep.
Last Words,
Death Row, Circa 2030
I am one of the ones, here,
who did what I am said to have done.
Look to yourselves—I was conceived the month
you voted him in—look to the high
court which went for execution
and against abortion. You sentenced me
to this life lived out till tomorrow And all
those people I killed, they’d be with you now,
if you’d let me die before I breathed,
when my mother and father needed me to die.
Would it have seemed more American to you if it
could have been a more public demise,
like this, if there could have been televised crowds
chanting outside the clinic, the cervix
magnified, on a drive-in screen,
the fetus me six feet tall
strapped to the table? Not that I
have a say in this—not tonight,
and not at eight o’clock tomorrow
morning, when I will be one of the dead
at last—how you have made me work for it.
Self-Portrait, Rear View
At first, I do not believe it, in the hotel
triple mirror, that that is my body, in
back, below the waist, and above
the legs—the thing that doesn’t stop moving
when I stop moving.
And it doesn’t look like just one thing,
or even one big, double thing
—even the word saddlebags has a
smooth, calfskin feel to it,
compared to this compendium
of net string bags shaking their booty of
cellulite fruits and nuts. Some lumps
look like bonbons translated intact
from chocolate box to buttocks, the curl on top
showing, slightly, through my skin. Once I see what I can
do with this, I do it, high-stepping
to make the rapids of my bottom rush
in ripples like a world wonder. Slowly,
I believe what I am seeing, a 54-year-old
rear end, once a tight end,
high and mighty, almost a chicken butt, now
exhausted, as if tragic. But this is not
an invasion, my cul-de-sac is not being
used to hatch alien cells, ball peens,
gyroscopes, sacks of marbles. It’s my hoard
of treasure, my good luck, not to be
dead, yet, though when I flutter
the wing of my ass again, and see,
in a clutch of eggs, each egg,
on its own, as if shell-less, shudder, I wonder
if anyone has ever died,
looking in a mirror, of horror. I think I will
not even catch a cold from it,
I will go to school to it, to Butt
Boot Camp, to the video store, where I saw,
in the window, my hero, my workout jelly
role model, my apotheosis: Killer Buns.
The Dead
When I ask my mother if she can remember
if my best friend, when I was nine,
died before, or after, her mother—
they had sprayed their tree with lead paint
in their closed garage—my mother describes
how furious my friend’s father was,
years later, when my mother and her second
husband beat him and his second wife
in the waltz contest. Her voice is melodious,
she loves to win, her rival’s loss
an erotic sweet. For a moment I see
it would not be an entirely bad thing
if my mother died. How interesting
to be in the world when she was not—how
odd to breathe air she would not recently
have breathed. I even envision her dead,
for a second—on her back, naked, like my father
small, my father as a woman, her mouth
open, as his was. Suddenly, I feel
not afraid—as if no one will hurt me.
And they’re together again, a moment—a bridal
pair of things, a tongs! As if they
delivered me like a message then were put to death.
They cannot unmake me. I can safely thank them
for my life. Thank you for my life.
Sleeves
for Edmund White
When Edmund said he is going to Hawaii
I was back there, 14 and never been kissed,
and the young man I liked had asked me to go
for a walk that evening on the beach. And what filled
my mind, all day, were the arm-holes
of his short-sleeved bright-flowered cotton shirt, those
circles which seemed of the diameter
of a pie tin—how would my hands, reaching
to go around him as he began to hug me, not
slip, like burrow mammals, into
those openings, not go to ground?
And the man was, I was telling Edmund,
the man was, what is it called, biff,
boff—buff, Edmund said—
the young man was a lifeguard
and a surfer, on the hard dune of each breast a
nipple like a tiny scatter of sand,
bits of coral and starfish. And of course
my fear was desire, to pour, up,
into him, and into myself, and
swim, and strike together for the shore
—where we stood, later, in the late evening, and his
arms opened, and my arms opened,
and the origami closed itself
around the delicate, shut kiss.
And the air smelled of plumeria
and frangipangi—when the plane door
opens, you will smell it! And Edmund said,
You know what homosexuals
are called in China? Cut Sleeves—
when the emperor’s lover fell asleep
in his arms, and lay sleeping on the silk of the royal
robe, and the emperor had to get up,
he cut off the sleeve of his gown, so as not
to wake the young man, but leave him in the deeps of his dream.
Good Measure
Something wakes me, at my mother’s house,
in the dark. On the back of my hand, a luminous
wedge, a patch of Alamogordo—
the new-risen moon, the last quarter,
as if my mother, in her sleep, took
a ladle, and poured this portion. Now that
my mother loves me, I feel a little
cheated—who will be true, anymore,
to the years of drought? Whoever will
be true to them can thirst in good measure
under the glistening breast. There used to be no
choice, for her, she was a gurdy
of atoms swinging from each other’s elbows,
a force of hurdy wolvine cream,
and then, later, there was choice, she could dwell
on herself in bitterness, or dwell on
herself in hope. But sometimes, lately, there’s a
motion, diurnal—when drenched with attention
she might turn to me, with affection—that’s when I
feel that sore resentful rib.
They call the half moon the last
quarter, staying faithful to the back bulge,
to the edge between too little and too much,
the narrow calcium line neither roasting
nor freezing—as if one could make one’s home
on that border, if one could just keep moving,
nomad offspring of the stone opal
wanderer who is borne, singing,
across the night. My mother loves me
with a full, child’s heart. Here is my pleynt.
PART FOUR: Cassiopeia
Cassiopeia
1. He Is Take
n Away
When they’d put her husband in the ambulance,
my mother stood beside it, looking into
its lighted window. It was midnight, the moon
like a larva high against the trunk
of the sequoia. The distant neighboring houses
were dark, the flowering shrubs dark,
I brought the car around, and she was
standing there, looking in that horizontal
picture window. I had never seen her so
still, yet she looked so alive, so vivid,
like a woman motionless at the moment of orgasm,
pure attention. She was glowing, slightly,
from the inner ambulance light, she seemed to
have no outside or inside, her surface
all depth,
every cell of her body was looking at him.
Doors slammed, I called to her, she
turned to me, like a scrimshaw Crusader
chess-piece rotated slowly on its base,
she called in response, melodious,
looking nowhere near me, she was
made of some other material,
wax or ivory or marble, she looked like
Homer ready to be led around the known globe.
2. The Music
On the phone my mother says she has been sorting
her late darling’s clothes—and it BREAKS
my HEART, and then there are soft sounds,
as if she’s been lowered down, into
a river of music. I’m not unhappy,
she says, this is better for me than church,
her voice through tears like the low singing
of a watered plant long not watered,
she lets me hear what she feels. I could be in a
cradle by the western shore of a sea, she could
be a young or an ancient mother.
Now I hear the melody
of the one bound to the mast. It had little
to do with me, her life, which lay
on my life, it was not really human life
but chemical, it was approximate landscape,
trenches and reaches, maybe it
was ordinary human life.
Now my mother sounds like me,
the way I sound to myself—one
who doesn’t know, who fails and hopes.
And I feel, now, that I had wanted never to stop blaming her,
like eating hard-shelled animals
at mid-molt. But now my mother
is like a tiny, shucked crier