by Sharon Olds
under their bed the trap-door to the
cellar, with its barrels of fresh apples, and
somewhere in me too is the path
down to the creek gleaming in the dark, a
way out of there.
Birthday Poem for My Grandmother
(for L.B.M.C., 1890–1975)
I stood on the porch tonight— which way do we
face to talk to the dead? I thought of the
new rose, and went out over the
grey lawn— things really
have no color at night. I descended
the stone steps, as if to the place where one
speaks to the dead. The rose stood
half-uncurled, glowing white in the
black air. Later I remembered
your birthday. You would have been ninety and getting
roses from me. Are the dead there
if we do not speak to them? When I came to see you
you were always sitting quietly in the chair,
not knitting, because of the arthritis,
not reading, because of the blindness,
just sitting. I never knew how you
did it or what you were thinking. Now I
sometimes sit on the porch, waiting,
trying to feel you there like the color of the
flowers in the dark.
Of All the Dead That Have Come
to Me, This Once
I have never written against the dead. I would
open my
shirt to them and say yes, the white
cones still making sugary milk,
but when Grandfather’s gold pocketwatch
came in by air over the Rockies,
over the dark yellow of the fields
and the black rivers, with Grandmother’s blank
face pressed against his name in the back,
I thought of how he put the empty
plate in front of my sister, turned out
the lights after supper, sat in the black
room with the fire, the light of the flames
flashing in his glass eye
in that cabin where he taught my father
how to do what he did to me, and I said
No. I said Let this one be dead.
Let the fall he made through that glass roof,
splintering, turning, the great shanks and
slices of glass in the air, be his last
appearance here.
Farewell Poem
(for M. M. O., 1880–1974)
The big, cut iceberg waits
outside the harbor like a spaceship.
Sends in emissaries: cold
chopped fish, floating cakes,
canoes of ice white as brides.
Lurks just beyond the warm
furred lip of the harbor, summer
berries in the bushes, loud stink
of fish drying on salty wooden
slats. Waits. Hides nine
tenths of its iron implacable
bulk under the belt of the water,
frigid as cods’ teeth, even
now in July. The sea bathes
her endless pale scarred hips.
The berg sits, cute as a hat,
snowy as egret feathers, waiting
to call the next one out to the other
world beyond the absolutely
frozen vessel.
She walks down
to the water without her walker.
With none of her three canes she was always
losing, joking about, looking for,
finding over her arm. She just
had her hair done, silver curls
obedient as ivy tendrils
over her child’s brow. She wears
the grey dress with a white collar,
sensible shoes, white socks,
diamond pin, sets her foot
on the cloudy crystal of an ice floe
and floats out to her mother, floats
out to the white iceberg waiting
ninety-three years for hot death
to deliver his favorite daughter home to
the cool white long room,
lace curtains from the parlor flying
like flags in the summer sky.
The Winter After Your Death
(for Katie Sheldon Brennan)
The long bands of mellow light
across the snow
narrow slowly.
The sun closes her gold fan
and nothing is left but black and white—
the quick steam of my breath, the dead
accurate shapes of the weeds, still, as if
pressed in an album.
Deep in my body my green heart
turns, and thinks of you. Deep in the
pond, under the thick trap
door of ice, the water moves,
the carp hangs like a sun, its scarlet
heart visible in its side.
Miscarriage
When I was a month pregnant, the great
clots of blood appeared in the pale
green swaying water of the toilet.
Dark red like black in the salty
translucent brine, like forms of life
appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut
shapes of fungi.
That was the only appearance made by that
child, the dark, scalloped shapes
falling slowly. A month later
our son was conceived, and I never went back
to mourn the one who came as far as the
sill with its information: that we could
botch something, you and I. All wrapped in
purple it floated away, like a messenger
put to death for bearing bad news.
The End
We decided to have the abortion, became
killers together. The period that came
changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple
who had been for life.
As we talked of it in bed, the crash
was not a surprise. We went to the window,
looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming
curved shears of glass as if we had
done it. Cops pulled the bodies out
bloody as births from the small, smoking
aperture of the door, laid them
on the hill, covered them with blankets that soaked
through. Blood
began to pour
down my legs into my slippers. I stood
where I was until they shot the bound
form into the black hole
of the ambulance and stood the other one
up, a bandage covering its head,
stained where the eyes had been.
The next morning I had to kneel
an hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,
rubbing with wet cloths at those dark
translucent spots, as one has to soak
a long time to deglaze the pan
when the feast is over.
Best Friends
(for Elizabeth Ewer, 1942–51)
The day my daughter turned ten, I thought of the
lank, glittering, greenish cap of your
gold hair. The last week of
your life, when I came each day after school,
I’d study the path to your front door,
the bricks laid close as your hairs. I’d try to
read the pattern, frowning down
for a sign.
The last day—there was not
a mark on that walk, not a stone out of place—
the nurses would not let me in.
We were nine. We had never mentioned death
or growing up. I had no more imagined
you dead
than you imagined me
a mother. But when I had a daughter
I named her for you, as if pulling you back
throu
gh a crack between the bricks.
She is ten now, Liddy.
She has outlived you, her dark hair gleaming like
the earth into which the path was pressed,
the path to you.
Absent One
(for Muriel Rukeyser)
People keep seeing you and telling me
how white you are, how thin you are.
I have not seen you for a year, but slowly you are
forming above my head, white as
petals, white as milk, the dark
narrow stems of your ankles and wrists,
until you are always with me, a flowering
branch suspended over my life.
Part Two
Poems for the Living
I. The Family
Possessed
(for my parents)
I have never left. Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns
wheeling over my bed, and the darkness
is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads
over my crib, your body-hairs
which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows,
one by one. And I never leave your sight,
I can look in the eyes of any stranger and
find you there, in the rich swimming
bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the
blue that reflects from the knife’s blade,
and I smell you always, the dead cigars and
Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming,
the slow stopped bear tread and the
quick fox, her nails on the ice,
and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the
coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts
opening like jaws, drops from your glands
clinging to my walls like pearls in the night.
You think I left—I was the child
who got away, thousands of miles,
but not a day goes past that I am not
turning someone into you.
Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I
turn now, in the fear of this moment,
into your soft stained paw
resting on her breast, into your breast trying to
creep away from under his palm—
your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,
your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.
The Victims
When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it, in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon’s helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away,
your secretaries taken away,
your lunches with three double bourbons,
your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits back, too, those dark
carcasses hung in your closet, and the black
noses of your shoes with their large pores?
She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it
until we pricked with her for your
annihilation, Father. Now I
pass the bums in doorways, the white
slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits of compressed silt, the stained
flippers of their hands, the underwater
fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and
took it from them in silence until they had
given it all away and had nothing
left but this.
The Forms
I always had the feeling my mother would
die for us, jump into a fire
to pull us out, her hair burning like
a halo, jump into water, her white
body going down and turning slowly,
the astronaut whose hose is cut
falling
into
blackness. She would have
covered us with her body, thrust her
breasts between our chests and the knife,
slipped us into her coat pocket
outside the showers. In disaster, an animal
mother, she would have died for us,
but in life as it was
she had to put herself
first.
She had to do whatever he
told her to do to the children, she had to
protect herself. In war, she would have
died for us, I tell you she would,
and I know: I am a student of war,
of gas ovens, smothering, knives,
drowning, burning, all the forms
in which I have experienced her love.
The Departure
(to my father)
Did you weep like the Shah when you left? Did you forget
the way you had had me tied to a chair, as
he forgot the ones strapped to the grille
in his name? You knew us no more than he knew them,
his lowest subjects, his servants, and we were
silent before you like that, bowing
backwards, not speaking, not eating unless we were
told to eat, the glass jammed to our
teeth and tilted like a brass funnel in the
soundproof cells of Teheran. Did you forget
the blood, blinding lights, pounding on the door, as
he forgot the wire, the goad,
the stone table? Did you weep as you left
as Reza Pahlevi wept when he rose
over the gold plain of Iran, did you
suddenly want to hear our voices, did you
start to rethink the darkness of our hair,
did you wonder if perhaps we had deserved to live,
did you love us, then?
Burn Center
When my mother talks about the Burn Center
she’s given to the local hospital
my hair lifts and wavers like smoke
in the air around my head. She speaks of the
beds in her name, the suspension baths and
square miles of lint, and I think of the
years with her, as her child, as if
without skin, walking around scalded
raw, first degree burns over ninety
percent of my body. I would stick to doorways I
tried to walk through, stick to chairs as I
tried to rise, pieces of my flesh
tearing off easily as
well-done pork, and no one gave me
a strip of gauze, or a pat of butter to
melt on my crackling side, but when I would
cry out she would hold me to her
hot griddle, when my scorched head stank she would
draw me deeper into the burning
room of her life. So when she talks about her
Burn Center, I think of a child
who will come there, float in water
murky as tears, dangle suspended in a
tub of ointment, suck ice while they
put out all the tiny subsidiary
flames in her hair near the brain, and I say
Let her sleep as long as it takes, let her walk out
without a scar, without a single mark to
honor the power of fire.
The Ideal Father
When I dream you, Dad, you come into the dream
clean, farouche, gesundheit, feral
fresh face, physically exact—
the ideal, the schemata, the blueprint, no mark of
pain. You’re perfect as a textbook example:
your hair like a definition of hair,
the root, the spear of horny substance, the
mouth of the follicle, the filament which forms the
coat of the mammal, the way the sheath
glistens where the shaft opens its oil to the light;
and your skin, the layers of the epidermis like
clear water through which we see the
subcutaneous fat, its pearls
swimming in cross-section; and your teeth, their
pork-white ceilings, enamel crowns,
pulp hollows, necks and roots like
squids’ legs, deep in the gum—not a
cavity, no whiff of rot; and your
body flawless, pink carnation
boutonnières of the nipples; and your sex
stiffening in textbook time,
record time, everything about you
exemplary. Where is the one who threw up?
The one who passed out, the one who would not
speak for a week, slapped the glasses off a
small girl’s face, bloodied his head and
sank through the water? I think he is dead.
I think the ideal father would hardly
let such a man live. After all he has
daughters to protect, laying his perfect
body over their sleep all night long.
Fate
Finally I just gave up and became my father,
his greased, defeated face shining toward
anyone I looked at, his mud-brown eyes
in my face, glistening like wet ground that
things you love have fallen onto
and been lost for good. I stopped trying
not to have his bad breath,
his slumped posture of failure, his sad
sex dangling on his thigh, his stomach
swollen and empty. I gave in
to my true self, I faced the world
through his sour mash, his stained acrid
vision, I floated out on his tears.
I saw the whole world shining
with the ecstasy of his grief, and I
myself, he, I, shined,
my oiled porous cheeks glaucous
as tulips, the rich smear of the petal,