by Sharon Olds
Maybe I am what she always wanted,
my father as a woman,
maybe I am what she wanted to be
when she first saw him, tall and smart,
standing there in the college yard with the
hard male light of 1937
shining on his slicked hair. She wanted that
power. She wanted that size. She pulled and
pulled through him as if he were silky
bourbon taffy, she pulled and pulled and
pulled through his body until she drew me out,
sticky and gleaming, her life after her life.
Maybe I am the way I am
because she wanted exactly that,
wanted there to be a woman
a lot like her, but who would not hold back, so she
pressed herself hard against him,
pressed and pressed the clear soft
ball of herself like a stick of beaten cream
against his stained sour steel grater
until I came out the other side of his body,
a tall woman, stained, sour, sharp,
but with that milk at the center of my nature.
I lie here now as I once lay
in the crook of her arm, her creature,
and I feel her looking down into me the way the
maker of a sword gazes at his face in the
steel of the blade.
Now I Lay Me
It is a fine prayer, Now I lay me
down to sleep, the power of the child
taking herself up in her arms
and laying herself down on her bed
as if she were her own mother,
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
her hands folded knuckle by knuckle,
feeling her heart beating in the knuckles.
Knees on the fine dark hair-like hardwood
beams of the floor, she commended herself
to the care of some reliable keeper
so that all night there might be a part of her
no one could touch. Unless while God had that part
she did not have it, but lay there a raw
soulless animal for someone to do dirt on …
If I should die before I wake seemed
possible, some nights, the father with the blood
on his face, the mother down to eighty-two pounds, it was a
mark of doom and a benison
to be able to say I pray the Lord
my soul to take—the chance that, dead,
she would be safe for eternity, which was
much longer than one of those bad nights—
she herself could see, each morning, the
blessing of the white dawn, like some true god coming,
she could get up, and wade in the false
goodness of another day.
It was all fine except for the word take,
word with the k like a claw near the end of it.
What if the Lord were another one of those takers,
what if the Lord were no bigger than her father,
what if those noises through the wall were not
her mother and father struggling to do it
or not do it, what if those noises
were the sound of the Lord wrestling with her father
on the round bedroom rug, and what if the
Lord, who did not eat real food,
got weaker, and her father, with all he ate
and drank, got stronger, what if the Lord
lost? God bless Mommy and Daddy
and Sister and Brother and Grama and Grampa
in Heaven, and then the light went out,
the last of the uneasy kisses,
and then she was alone in the dark,
and the darkness started to grow there, in her room,
as it liked to do, and then the night began.
The Chute
When I was a kid, my father built a
hole down through the center of the house.
It started in the upstairs closet, a
black, square mouth like a well
with a lid on it, it plummeted down
behind the kitchen wall, and the raw
pine cloaca tip of it was
down in the basement where the twisted wicker
basket lay on the cement floor,
so when someone dropped in laundry at the top, it would
drop with the speed of sheer falling—in the
kitchen you’d hear that whisk of pure
descent behind the wall. And halfway
down there was an electric fixture for the
doorbell—that bell my father would ring and
ring years later when he stood at the door with that
blood on him, like a newborn’s caul,
ringing ringing to enter. But back
then he was only halfway down, a
wad of sheets stuck in the chute,
he could still fix the doorbell when it busted.
He’d stand his kids in front of him,
three skinny scared braggart kids,
and run his gaze over them, a
surgeon running his eyes over the tray,
and he’d select a kid, and take that kid by the
ankles and slowly feed that kid
down the chute. First you’d do a handstand on the
lip of it and then he’d lower you in,
the smell of pine and dirty laundry,
his grip on your ankles like the steel he sold,
he’d lower you until your whole body was in it
and you’d find the little wires, red and
blue, like a vein and a nerve, and you’d tape them together.
We thought it was such an honor to be chosen,
and like all honors it was mostly terror, not
only the blood in your head like a sac of
worms in wet soil, but how could you believe he would
not let go? He would joke about it,
standing there, holding his kid like a
bottle brush inside a bottle, or the
way they drown people, he’d lower us down as if
dipping us into the darkness before birth
and he’d pretend to let go—he loved to hear
passionate screaming in a narrow space—
how could you trust him? And then if you were
his, half him, your left hand maybe and your
left foot dipped in the gleaming
murky liquor of his nature, how could you
trust yourself? What would it feel like
to be on the side of life? How did the
good know they were good, could they look at their
hand and see, under the skin, the
greenish light? We hung there in the dark
and yet, you know, he never dropped us
or meant to, he only liked to say he would,
so although it’s a story with some cruelty in it,
finally it’s a story of love
and release, the way the father pulls you out of nothing
and stands there foolishly grinning.
The Blue Dress
The first November after the divorce
there was a box from my father on my birthday—no card, but a
big box from Hink’s, the dark
department store with a balcony and
mahogany rail around the balcony, you could
stand and press your forehead against it
until you could almost feel the dense
grain of the wood, and stare down
into the rows and rows of camisoles,
petticoats, bras, as if looking down
into the lives of women. The box
was from there, he had braved that place for me
the way he had entered my mother once
to get me out. I opened the box—I had
never had a prese
nt from him—
and there was a blue shirtwaist dress
blue as the side of a blue teal
disguised to go in safety on the steel-blue water.
I put it on, a perfect fit,
I liked that it was not too sexy, just a
blue dress for a 14-year-old daughter the way
Clark Kent’s suit was just a plain suit for a reporter, but I
felt the weave of that mercerized Indian Head cotton
against the skin of my upper arms and my
wide thin back and especially the skin of my
ribs under those new breasts I had
raised in the night like earthworks in commemoration of his name.
A year later, during a fight about
just how awful my father had been,
my mother said he had not picked out the dress,
just told her to get something not too expensive, and then
had not even sent a check for it,
that’s the kind of man he was. So I
never wore it again in her sight
but when I went away to boarding school I
wore it all the time there,
loving the feel of it, just
casually mentioning sometimes it was a gift from my father,
wanting in those days to appear to have something
whether it was true or a lie, I didn’t care, just to
have something.
Late Poem to My Father
Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door
the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the
oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
directly to that boy in the fiery room,
as if it could reach him in time.
June 24
(for my father)
I look at the date, and it has such a look of
fullness, the fat juicy word June and then the
2 and the 4, like a couple and a couple coupled,
the whole date such a look of satiety and plenitude,
and then I remember today is your birthday,
you are 68, it is the birthday of an aging man
and yet I feel such celebration,
as if you were newborn. And it’s not just the
turgid redness of your face, or your plump
fleshy hands, appealing as a baby’s,
it isn’t your earth-brown physical eyes
blank as a baby’s lacking knowledge and memory,
it isn’t just that a man of 68
is young still, you could have a child
after my own fertility is gone,
a baby dark and smart as you were
the hour of your birth, when your skin shone with the
oil of the world that lies on either
side of our world. The day moves me
because you were given back to me.
You died night after night in the years of my childhood,
sinking down into speechless torpor,
and then you were told to leave for good
and you left, for better, for worse, for a long
time I did not see you or touch you—
and then, as if to disprove the ascendancy of darkness,
little by little you came back to me
until now I have you, a living father
standing in the California sun
unwrapping the crackling caul off a cigar
and placing it in the center of his mouth
where the parent is placed, at the center of the child’s life.
After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood
When you tilted toward me, arms out
like someone trying to walk through a fire,
when you swayed toward me, crying out you were
sorry for what you had done to me, your
eyes filling with terrible liquid like
balls of mercury from a broken thermometer
skidding on the floor, when you quietly screamed
Where else could I turn? Who else did I have?, the
chopped crockery of your hands swinging toward me, the
water cracking from your eyes like moisture from
stones under heavy pressure, I could not
see what I would do with the rest of my life.
The sky seemed to be splintering, like a window
someone is bursting into or out of, your
tiny face glittered as if with
shattered crystal, with true regret, the
regret of the body. I could not see what my
days would be with you sorry, with
you wishing you had not done it, the
sky falling around me, its shards
glistening in my eyes, your old, soft
body fallen against me in horror I
took you in my arms, I said It’s all right,
don’t cry, it’s all right, the air filled with
flying glass, I hardly knew what I
said or who I would be now that I had forgiven you.
201 Upper Terrace, San Francisco
We were up and down the sickening hills of the city
and then at the top, at the tip, I saw
the sign, the street where I had lived as a baby. We drove
up it and up it till three streets
fell away as if plummeting and I
recognized it, a small building with
naked picture windows—the shape of those
rectangles burned on my 3-year-old mind—we
stopped for a moment by the front archway, a
hole in the building like the gates of birth,
dark and tiled inside, dark
spiked plants. I gazed on it as you’d
gaze on a cell where you had been kept, with
awe and terror, I realized
I was conceived here, at the top of this white
hill with the three streets sliding down
straight as water, these two blind rectangle
eyes facing this Western bay as she
stood at the window afterwards and I
whipped my tail and sailed up and
saw the egg like a trap door in the
side of the jail and I pushed through it
head first, my tail fell off I began
to explode in ecstasy released,
released, and in nine months they
lifted me up to the view and said to me
This is the world we give you, and said to the
view, We give you this girl.
III
California Swimming Pool
On the dirt, the dead live-oak leaves
lay like dried-out turtle shells,
scorched and crisp, their points sharp as
wasps’ stin
gers. Sated mosquitoes
hung in the air like sharks in water,
and when you held up a tuna sandwich
a gold sphere of yellow-jackets
formed around your hand in the air
and moved when you moved. Everything circled
around the great pool, blue and
glittering as the sacred waters at
Crocodilopolis, and the boys
came from underwater like that
to pull you down. But the true center was the
dressing rooms: the wet suits,
the smell of chlorine, cold concrete,
the splintered pine wall, on the other
side of which were boys, actually
naked there in air clouded as the
shadows at the bottom of the pool, where the crocodiles
glistened in their slick skins. All summer
the knothole in the wall hissed at me
come see, come see, come eat and be eaten.
First Boyfriend
(for D.R.)
We would park on any quiet street,
gliding over to the curb as if by accident,
the houses dark, the families sealed into them,
we’d park away from the street-light, just the
faint waves of its amber grit
reached your car, you’d switch off the motor and
turn and reach for me, and I would
slide into your arms as if I had been born for it,
the ochre corduroy of your sports jacket
pressing the inside of my wrist,
making its pattern of rivulets,
water rippling out like sound waves from a source.
Your front seat had an overpowering
male smell, as if the chrome had been
rubbed with jism, a sharp stale
delirious odor like the sour plated
taste of the patina on an old watch, the
fragrance of your sex polished till it shone in the night, the
jewel of Channing Street, of Benvenue Avenue, of
Panoramic, of Dwight Way, I
returned to you as if to the breast of my father,
grain of the beard on your umber cheeks,
delicate line of tartar on the edge of your teeth,
the odor of use, the stained brass
air in the car as if I had come
back to a pawnshop to claim what was mine—
and as your tongue went down my throat,
right down the central nerve of my body, the
gilt balls of the street-light gleamed like a
pawnbroker’s over your second-hand Chevy and
all the toasters popped up and
