by Sharon Olds
shredded pom-poms in her fists.
Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor
Outside the operating room of the sex-change doctor, a tray of penises.
There is no blood. This is not Vietnam, Chile, Buchenwald. They were surgically removed under anaesthetic. They lie there neatly, each with a small space around it.
The anaesthetic is wearing off now. The chopped-off sexes lie on the silver tray.
One says I am a weapon thrown down. Let there be no more killing.
Another says I am a thumb lost in the threshing machine. Bright straw fills the air. I will never have to work again.
The third says I am a caul removed from his eyes. Now he can see.
The fourth says I want to be painted by Géricault, a still life with a bust of Apollo, a drape of purple velvet, and a vine of ivy leaves.
The fifth says I was a dirty little dog, I knew he’d have me put to sleep.
The sixth says I am safe. Now no one can hurt me.
Only one is unhappy. He lies there weeping in terrible grief, crying out Father, Father!
The Solution
Finally they got the Singles problem under control, they made it scientific. They opened huge Sex Centers—you could simply go and state what you want and they would find you someone who wanted that too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like to Be Touched and Held and when someone came and stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together.
At first it went great. A steady stream of people under the sign I Like to Give Pain paired up with the steady stream of people from under I Like to Receive Pain. Foreplay Only—No Orgasm found its adherents, and Orgasm Only—No Foreplay matched up its believers. A loyal Berkeley, California, policeman stood under the sign Married Adults, Lights Out, Face to Face, Under a Sheet, because that’s the only way it was legal in Berkeley—but he stood there a long time in his lonely blue law coat. And the man under I Like to Be Sung to While Bread Is Kneaded on My Stomach had been there weeks without a reply.
Things began to get strange. The Love Only—No Sex was doing fine; the Sex Only—No Love was doing really well, pair after pair walking out together like wooden animals off a child’s ark, but the line for 38D or Bigger was getting unruly, shouting insults at the line for 8 Inches or Longer, and odd isolated signs were springing up everywhere, Retired Schoolteacher and Parakeet—No Leather; One Rm/No Bath/View of Sausage Factory.
The din rose in the vast room. The line under I Want to Be Fucked Senseless was so long that portable toilets had to be added and a minister brought in for deaths, births, and marriages on the line. Over under I Want to Fuck Senseless—no one, a pile of guns. A hollow roaring filled the enormous gym. More and more people began to move over to Want to Be Fucked Senseless. The line snaked around the gym, the stadium, the whole town, out into the fields. More and more people joined it, until Fucked Senseless stretched across the nation in a huge wide belt like the Milky Way, and since they had to name it they named it, they called it the American Way.
The Pope’s Penis
It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dimness and the heat—and at night,
while his eyes asleep, it stands up
in praise of God.
When
I wonder, now, only when it will happen,
when the young mother will hear the
noise like somebody’s pressure cooker
down the block, going off. She’ll go out in the yard,
holding her small daughter in her arms,
and there, above the end of the street, in the
air above the line of the trees,
she will see it rising, lifting up
over our horizon, the upper rim of the
gold ball, large as a giant
planet starting to lift up over ours.
She will stand there in the yard holding her daughter,
looking at it rise and glow and blossom and rise,
and the child will open her arms to it,
it will look so beautiful.
II
I Go Back to May 1937
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to, and I will tell about it.
Saturn
He lay on the couch night after night,
mouth open, the darkness of the room
filling his mouth, and no one knew
my father was eating his children. He seemed to
rest so quietly, vast body
inert on the sofa, big hand
fallen away from the glass.
What could be more passive than a man
passed out every night—and yet as he lay
on his back, snoring, our lives slowly
disappeared down the hole of his life.
My brother’s arm went in up to the shoulder
and he bit it off, and sucked at the wound
as one sucks at the sockets of lobster. He took
my brother’s head between his lips
and snapped it like a cherry off the stem. You would have seen
only a large, handsome man
heavily asleep, unconscious. And yet
somewhere in his head his soil-colored eyes
were open, the circles of the whites glittering
as he crunched the torso of his child between his jaws,
crushed the bones like the soft shells of crabs
and the delicacies of the genitals
rolled back along his tongue. In the nerves of his gums and
bowels he knew what he was doing and he could not
stop himself, like orgasm, his
boy’s feet crackling like two raw fish
between his teeth. This is what he wanted,
to take that life into his mouth
and show what a man could do—show his son
what a man’s life was.
What if God
And what if God had been watching, when my mother
came into my room, at night, to lie down on me
and pray and cry? What did He do when her
long adult body rolled on me
like lava from the top of the mountain
and the magma popped from her ducts, and my bed
shook from the tremors,
the cracking of my nature
across? What was He? Was He a bison
to lower His partly extinct head
and suck His Puritan phallus while we cried
and prayed to Him, or was He a squirrel
reaching through her hole in my shell, His arm
up to the elbow in the yolk of my soul
stirring, stirring the gold? Or was He
a kid in Biology, dissecting me
while she held my split carapace apart
so He could firk out the eggs, or was He a man
entering me while she pried my spirit
open in the starry dark—
she said that all we did was done in His sight
so He must have seen her weep, into my
hair, and slip my soul from between my
ribs like a tiny hotel soap, He
washed His hands of me as I washed my
hands of Him. Is there a God in the house?
Is there a God in the house? Then reach down
and take that woman off that child’s body,
take that woman by the nape of the neck like a young cat,
and lift her up, and deliver her over to me.
History: 13
When I found my father that night, the blood
smeared on his head and face, I did not
know who had done it. I had loved his body
whole, his head, his face, untouched,
and now he floated on the couch, his arms
up, like Mussolini hanging
upside down in the air, his head
dangling where they could reach him with boards and their
fingernails, those who had lived
under his tyranny.
I saw how the inside of the body could be
brought to the surface, to cover the skin,
his heart standing on his face, the weight of his
body pressing down on his head,
his life slung in the bag of his scalp,
and who had done it? Had I, had my mother,
my brother, my sister, we who had been silent
under him, under him for years? He lay in his
gore all night, as the body hung all
day outside the gas station in
Milan, and when they helped him up and
washed him and he left, I did not see it—
I was not there for the ashes, I had been there
only for the fire, I had seen my father
strung and mottled, mauled as if taken and
raked by a crowd, and I of the crowd
over his body, and how could the day be
good after that, how could anything be good
in such a world, I turned my back
on happiness, at 13 I entered
a life of mourning, of mourning for the Fascist.
The Meal
Mama, I never stop seeing you there
at the breakfast table when I’d come home from school—
sitting with your excellent skeletal posture
facing that plate with the one scoop of cottage cheese on it,
forcing yourself to eat, though you did not want to live,
feeding yourself, small spoonful by
small spoonful, so you would not die and
leave us without a mother as you were
left without a mother. You’d sit
in front of that mound rounded as a breast and
giving off a cold moony light,
light of the life you did not want, you would
hold yourself there and stare down at it,
an orphan forty years old staring at the breast,
a freshly divorced woman down to 82 pounds
staring at the cock runny with milk gone sour,
a daughter who had always said
the best thing her mother ever did for her
was to die. I came home every day to
find you there, dry-eyed, unbent, that
hot control in the breakfast nook, your
delicate savage bones over the cheese
curdled like the breast of the mother twenty years in the
porous earth,
and yet what I remember is your
spoon moving like the cock moving in the
body of the girl waking to the power of her pleasure,
your spoon rising in courage, bite after bite, you
tilted rigid over that plate until you
polished it for my life.
Alcatraz
When I was a girl, I knew I was a man
because they might send me to Alcatraz
and only men went to Alcatraz.
Every time we drove to the city
I’d see it there, white as a white
shark in the shark-rich Bay, the bars like
milk-white ribs. I knew I had pushed my
parents too far, my inner badness had
spread like ink and taken me over, I could
not control my terrible thoughts,
terrible looks, and they had often said
they would send me there—maybe the very next
time I spilled my milk, Ala
Cazam, the aluminum doors would slam, I’d be
there where I belonged, a girl-faced man in the
prison no one had escaped from. I did not
fear the other prisoners,
I knew who they were, men like me who had
spilled their milk one time too many,
not been able to curb their thoughts—
what I feared was the horror of the circles: circle
sky around the earth, circle of
land around the Bay, circle of
water around the island, circle of
sharks around the shore, circle of
outer walls, inner walls,
steel girders, chrome bars,
circle of my cell around me, and there at the
center, the glass of milk and the guard’s
eyes upon me as I reached out for it.
San Francisco
When we’d go to San Francisco, my father
seemed to seek out the steepest streets,
he would sit behind the wheel and smile
to himself, his face red as a lobster
at Fisherman’s Wharf after they drop it
green and waving into boiling water.
His eyes would snap as if popping from a pod,
his black hair would smoke in that salty
air, he would tilt the nose of the car
up and press on the gas. We’d begin
the ascent, nearly vertical,
tires about to lose their grip on those
slanted cobbles, he’d inch us up, like an
engineering experiment
we’d barely rise, till we hung in space from
nothing, like driving up an elevator shaft,
the black pull of the earth’s weight
sucking us back, he’d slow down more and
more, we’d barely rise past buildings
pressed to the side of the precipice
like trees up the face of a cliff. I do not
remember my mother, but she was there,
this may have been for her. As we neared the
top he went slower, and slower, and then
shifted into first, I think he was smiling,
and in that silence between gears
I would break, weeping and peeing, the fluids of my
body bursting out like people from the
windows of a burning high-rise.
We’d hit the peak, tilt level,
but what was life when the man who had made my
body liked to dangle it over empty space and
tease me with death. He sat there sparkling, a
refuse dump, the wheel loose
in his hands, the reins of my life held slack.
We’d climb out, my knees shaking and I
stank, to look at the world s
pread out at our
feet as if we owned it,
as if we had power over our lives,
as if my father had control of himself
or I of my fate—
far below us,
blue and dazzling, the merciless cold
beauty of the Bay, my whole saved life ahead of me.
Looking at My Father
I do not think I am deceived about him.
I know about the drinking, I know he’s a tease,
obsessive, rigid, selfish, sentimental,
but I could look at my father all day
and not get enough: the large creased
ball of his forehead, slightly aglitter like the
sheen on a well-oiled baseball glove;
his eyebrows, the hairs two inches long,
black and silver, reaching out in
continual hope and curtailment; and most of
all I could look forever at his eyes,
the way they bulge out as if eager to see and
yet are glazed as if blind, the whites
hard and stained as boiled eggs
boiled in sulphur water, the irises
muddy as the lip of a live volcano, the
pupils glittering pure black,
magician black. Then there is his nose
rounded and pocked and comfy as the bulb of a
horn a clown would toot, and his lips
solid and springy. I even like to
look in his mouth, stained brown with
cigars and bourbon, my eyes sliding down the
long amber roots of his teeth,
right in there where Mother hated, and
up the scorched satin of the sides and
vault, even the knobs on the back of his
tongue. I know he is not perfect but my
body thinks his body is perfect, the
fine stretched coarse pink
skin, the big size of him, the
sour-ball mass, darkness, hair,
sex, legs even longer than mine,
lovely feet. What I know I know, what my
body knows it knows, it likes to
slip the leash of my mind and go and
look at him, like an animal
looking at water, then going to it and
drinking until it has had its fill and can
lie down and sleep.
Why My Mother Made Me
