The Dead and the Living

by Sharon Olds

evening light, we did not turn back,

  we stayed with it, even though we were

  far beyond what we knew, we rose

  into the grain of the cloud, even though we were

  frightened, the air hollow, even though

  nothing grew there, even though it is a

  place from which no one has ever come back.

  III. The Children

  Exclusive

  (for my daughter)

  I lie on the beach, watching you

  as you lie on the beach, memorizing you

  against the time when you will not be with me:

  your empurpled lips, swollen in the sun

  and smooth as the inner lips of a shell;

  your biscuit-gold skin, glazed and

  faintly pitted, like the surface of a biscuit;

  the serious knotted twine of your hair.

  I have loved you instead of anyone else,

  loved you as a way of loving no one else,

  every separate grain of your body

  building the god, as I built you within me,

  a sealed world. What if from your lips

  I had learned the love of other lips,

  from your starred, gummed lashes the love of

  other lashes, from your shut, quivering

  eyes the love of other eyes,

  from your body the bodies,

  from your life the lives?

  Today I see it is there to be learned from you:

  to love what I do not own.

  Six-Year-Old Boy

  We get to the country late at night

  in late May, the darkness is warm and

  smells of half-opened lilac.

  Our son is asleep on the back seat,

  his wiry limbs limp and supple

  except where his hard-on lifts his pajamas like the

  earth above the shoot of a bulb.

  I say his name, he opens one eye and it

  rolls back to the starry white.

  I tell him he can do last pee

  on the grass, and he smiles on the surface of sleep like

  light on the surface of water.

  He pulls his pajamas down and there it

  is, gleaming like lilac in the dark,

  hard as a heavy-duty canvas fire-hose

  shooting its steel stream.

  He leans back, his pale face

  blissful. The piss, lacy and fragile,

  arcs over the black lawn.

  Afterwards, no hands,

  he shakes himself dry, cock tossing like a

  horse’s white neck, and then he

  leans against the car, grinning,

  eyes closed, sound asleep,

  his sex pointing straight ahead,

  leading him

  as if by the nose

  into his life, late May,

  June, late June, July,

  full summer.

  Eggs

  My daughter has turned against eggs. Age six

  to nine, she cooked them herself, getting up

  at six to crack the shells, slide the

  three yolks into the bowl,

  slit them with the whisk, beat them till they hissed

  and watch the pan like an incubator as they

  firmed, gold. Lately she’s gone from

  three to two to one and now she

  cries she wants to quit eggs.

  It gets on her hands, it’s slimy, and it’s hard

  to get all the little things out:

  puddles of gluten glisten on the counter

  with small, curled shapes floating in their

  sexual smear. She moans. It is getting

  too close. Next birthday she’s ten and then

  it’s open season, no telling when

  the bright, crimson dot appears

  like the sign on a fertilized yolk. She has carried

  all her eggs in the two baskets

  woven into her fine side,

  but soon they’ll be slipping down gently,

  sliding. She grips the counter where the raw

  whites jump, and the spiral shapes

  signal from the glittering gelatine, and she

  wails for her life.

  Size and Sheer Will

  The fine, green pajama cotton,

  washed so often it is paper-thin and

  iridescent, has split like a sheath

  and the glossy white naked bulbs of

  our son’s toes thrust forth like crocus

  this early Spring. The boy is growing

  as fast as he can, elongated

  wrists dangling, lean meat

  showing between the shirt and the belt.

  If there were a rack to stretch himself, he would

  strap his slight body to it.

  If there were a machine to enter,

  skip the next ten years and be

  sixteen immediately, this boy would

  do it. All day long he cranes his

  neck, like a plant in the dark with a single

  light above it, or a sailor under

  tons of green water, longing

  for the surface, for his rightful life.

  For My Daughter

  That night will come. Somewhere someone will be

  entering you, his body riding

  under your white body, dividing

  your blood from your skin, your dark, liquid

  eyes open or closed, the slipping

  silken hair of your head fine

  as water poured at night, the delicate

  threads between your legs curled

  like stitches broken. The center of your body

  will tear open, as a woman will rip the

  seam of her skirt so she can run. It will happen,

  and when it happens I will be right here

  in bed with your father, as when you learned to read

  you would go off and read in your room

  as I read in mine, versions of the story

  that changes in the telling, the story of the river.

  Rite of Passage

  As the guests arrive at my son’s party

  they gather in the living room—

  short men, men in first grade

  with smooth jaws and chins.

  Hands in pockets, they stand around

  jostling, jockeying for place, small fights

  breaking out and calming. One says to another

  How old are you? Six. I’m seven. So?

  They eye each other, seeing themselves

  tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their

  throats a lot, a room of small bankers,

  they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you

  up, a seven says to a six,

  the dark cake, round and heavy as a

  turret, behind them on the table. My son,

  freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,

  chest narrow as the balsa keel of a

  model boat, long hands

  cool and thin as the day they guided him

  out of me, speaks up as a host

  for the sake of the group.

  We could easily kill a two-year-old,

  he says in his clear voice. The other

  men agree, they clear their throats

  like Generals, they relax and get down to

  playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

  Relinquishment

  On a black night in early March,

  the fire hot, my daughter says

  Wrap me in something. I get the old

  grey quilt, gleaming like a sloughed

  insect casing, and wrap it around and

  around her narrow nine-year-old body,

  hollow and flexible. Cover my face,

  she hisses in excitement. I cover her face

  and fall back from the narrow, silver

  shape on the carpet.

  How finally

  she is getting away—an Egyptian child

&n
bsp; bound in gauze, set in a boat

  on a black night in early March

  and pushed out on the water, given

  over to the gods of the next world

  who will find her

  or not find her.

  Son

  Coming home from the women-only bar,

  I go into my son’s room.

  He sleeps—fine, freckled face

  thrown back, the scarlet lining of his mouth

  shadowy and fragrant, his small teeth

  glowing dull and milky in the dark,

  opal eyelids quivering

  like insect wings, his hands closed

  in the middle of the night.

  Let there be enough

  room for this life: the head, lips,

  throat, wrists, hips, penis,

  knees, feet. Let no part go

  unpraised. Into any new world we enter, let us

  take this man.

  Pre-Adolescent in Spring

  Through the glass door thin as a light freeze on the pond,

  my girl calls me out.

  She is sucking ice, a cup of cubes

  beside her, sparkling and loosening.

  The sun glints in her hair dark as the

  packed floor of the pine forest,

  its hot resin smell rising like a

  smell of sex. She leaps off the porch and

  runs on the grass, her buttocks like an unripe

  apricot. She comes back, hair

  smoking, face cool and liquid,

  skin that vital, translucent white of the

  casing of milk-weed pods. She fishes

  another cube from the cup with her tongue.

  Around us the flat spears of bulbs

  are rising from inside the ground.

  Above us the buds are opening. I hold

  tight to this child beside me, and she

  leans her body against me, heavy,

  its layers still folded, its fragrance only

  half unlocked, but the ice now rapidly

  melting in her mouth.

  Blue Son

  All day with my blue son,

  sick again, the blue skin

  under his eyes, blue tracing of his

  veins over the bones of his chest

  pronounced as the ribs of the dead, a green

  vein in his groin, blue-green as the

  numbers on an arm. His eloquent face

  grows thinner each hour, the germs use him

  like a soap. Exhaustion strips him, and under each

  layer of sweetness a deeper layer of

  sweetness is bared. His white skin,

  so fine it has no grain, goes blue-grey,

  and the burning blue of his eye

  dies down and goes out, it is the faded cobalt on the

  side of a dead bird. He seems to

  withdraw to a great distance, as if he is

  gone and looking back at me

  without regret, patient, like an old

  man who has just dug his grave and

  waits at the edge, in the evening light,

  naked, blue with cold, in terrible

  obedience.

  Pajamas

  My daughter’s pajamas lie on the floor

  inside out, thin and wrinkled as

  peeled skins of peaches when you ease the

  whole skin off at once.

  You can see where her waist emerged, and her legs,

  her arms, and head, the fine material

  gathered in rumples like skin the caterpillar

  ramped out of and left to shrivel.

  You can see, there at the center of the bottoms,

  the raised cotton seam like the line

  down the center of fruit, where the skin first splits

  and curls back. You can almost see the hard

  halves of her young buttocks, the precise

  stem-mark of her sex. Her shed

  skin shines at my feet, and in the air there is a

  sharp fragrance like peach brandy—

  the birth-room pungence of her released life.

  The Killer

  Whenever there’s a lull in the action, my son

  sights along his invisible sights and

  picks things off. He eyes a pillar

  three rows over, pivots and easily

  fires—a hit, you can tell by the flames and

  smoke reflected in his glittering eyes.

  Everything becomes a target—

  cops topple, a whole populace

  falls as he aims, yet I know this boy,

  kind and tender. He whirls and lets them

  have it. Tangents straighter than the arc of his

  pee connect him to all he sees

  like a way to touch: as the spider travels its

  silver wires, our son goes out along his

  line of fire, marking each thing

  with the sign of his small ecstatic life.

  The Sign of Saturn

  Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an

  amber black look, like my father

  about to pass out from disgust, and I remember

  she was born under the sign of Saturn,

  the father who ate his children. Sometimes

  the dark, silent back of her head

  reminds me of him unconscious on the couch

  every night, his face turned away.

  Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother

  with that coldness that passed for reason in him,

  that anger hardened by will, and when she rages

  into her room, and slams the door,

  I can see his vast blank back

  when he passed out to get away from us

  and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,

  to coal. Sometimes I see that coal

  ignite in her eyes. As I talk to her,

  trying to persuade her toward the human, her little

  clear face tilts as if she can

  not hear me, as if she were listening

  to the blood in her own ear, instead,

  her grandfather’s voice.

  Armor

  Just about at the triple-barreled pistol

  I can’t go on. I sink down

  as if shot, beside the ball of its butt

  larded with mother-of-pearl. My son

  leaves me on the bench, and goes on. Hand on

  hip, he gazes at a suit of armor,

  blue eyes running over the silver,

  looking for a slit. He shakes his head,

  hair greenish as the gold velvet

  cod-skirt nonindent before him in volutes

  at a metal groin. Next, I see him

  facing a case of shields, fingering

  the sweater over his heart, and then

  for a long time I don’t see him, as a mother will

  lose her son in war. I sit

  and think about men. Finally the boy

  comes back, sated, so fattened with gore

  his eyelids bulge. We exit under the

  huge tumescent jousting irons,

  their pennants a faded rose, like the mist

  before his eyes. He slips his hand

  lightly in mine, and says Not one of those

  suits is really safe. But when we

  get to the wide museum steps

  railed with gold like the descent from heaven,

  he can’t resist,

  and before my eyes, down the stairs,

  over and over, clutching his delicate

  unprotected chest, my son

  dies, and dies.

  35/10

  Brushing out my daughter’s dark

  silken hair before the mirror

  I see the grey gleaming on my head,

  the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it

  just as we begin to go

  they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck

  clarifying as the fine bones of her

&nbs
p; hips sharpen? As my skin shows

  its dry pitting, she opens like a small

  pale flower on the tip of a cactus;

  as my last chances to bear a child

  are falling through my body, the duds among them,

  her full purse of eggs, round and

  firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about

  to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled

  fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old

  story—the oldest we have on our planet—

  the story of replacement.

  The Missing Boy

  (for Etan Patz)

  Every time we take the bus

  my son sees the picture of the missing boy.

  He looks at it like a mirror—the dark

  blond hair, the pale skin,

  the blue eyes, the electric-blue sneakers with

  slashes of jagged gold. But of course that

  kid is little, only six and a half,

  an age when things can happen to you,

  when you’re not really safe, and our son is seven,

  practically fully grown—why, he would

  tower over that kid if they could

  find him and bring him right here on this bus and

  stand them together. He sways in the silence

  wishing for that, the tape on the picture

  gleaming over his head, beginning to

  melt at the center and curl at the edges as it

  ages. At night, when I put him to bed,

  my son holds my hand tight

  and says he’s sure that kid’s all right,

  nothing to worry about, he just

  hopes he’s getting the food he likes,

  not just any old food, but the food

  he likes the most, the food he is used to.

  Bread

  When my daughter makes bread, a cloud of flour

  hangs in the air like pollen. She sifts and

  sifts again, the salt and sugar

  close as the grain of her skin. She heats the

  water to body temperature

  with the sausage lard, fragrant as her scalp

  the day before hair-wash, and works them together on a

  floured board. Her broad palms

  bend the paste toward her and the heel of her hand

  presses it away, until the dough