by Sharon Olds
waters the shallow pit, kneels and
presses tulip-bulbs into the dirt,
screwing them in like bulbs into sockets,
Black Parrots, Cardinals,
Flaming Parrots, Queens of the Night,
scrapes the rest of the soil in and
waters it again, beginning to flag,
sprinkles grass-seed on the top.
It is over, they are
dead, then, curled in the box with its
scarlet velvet lining, on a bed of
sunflower seeds for the other side,
and where is she? And that love she poured into them,
where is it, now? Dead? She turns and
walks to the house, her heart cold and
hard in her chest as a bulb in the winter ground.
Mouse Elegy
After he petted his mouse awhile,
our son said “He’s really still,
he doesn’t move at all,” running his
small finger over the tiny
luxurious black and white back,
and then in awe and shock he said “He’s—
dead.” I lifted him out of his cage in his
bed, a brown-rice box, and our boy
turned and turned his chest as if
struggling to get unstrapped from something,
twisting and twisting from the waist up and then
trying to get ahold of me
several times as if he couldn’t, as
if something was holding him by the body but
finally it broke, he came into my arms,
I said whatever you say then,
My darling, my sweetheart.
We got a hanky with roses on it and
laid it on the kitchen floor and laid
Blackie on it. He drifted there like a
long comma,
front paws, pink and tiny as
chips of broken crockery, held
up in wonder, like a shepherd at the Christ Child’s
crèche; back paws strong as a jackrabbit’s
thrust back in mid-leap; and the
thick whisker of the tail arrested in a
lovely male curve. We kneeled on
either side of the miniature head,
wedge-shaped and white, floating there with an
air of calm absence and demanding dreams.
I started to roll up the hanky, rocking the
light body a little, and one of his
ears unfurled, a grey petal
opening slowly in the night, and then we
wrapped Blackie in red roses and
paper towels, and laid him in the glossy
black box lined with crimson
the champagne came in, we put it in the freezer
until we could take him to the country and crack the
frozen ground with axes so Blackie can
lie with the others in the earth, in a field of mice.
The Month of June: 13 ½
As our daughter approaches graduation and
puberty at the same time, at her
own, calm, deliberate, serious rate,
she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her
hands, thrust out her hip-bones, chant
I’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming
open around her, a chrysalis cracking and
letting her out, it falls behind her and
joins the other husks on the ground,
7th grade, 6th grade, the
magenta rind of 5th grade, the
hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain,
3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of
1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and
kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket
taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth.
The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a
cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her
jerky sexy child’s joke dance of
self, self, her throat tight and a
hard new song coming out of it, while her
two dark eyes shine
above her body like a good mother and a
good father who look down and
love everything their baby does, the way she
lives their love.
Boy Out in the World
Our son at ten does not believe in evil,
he judges by himself, he knows no man
would willingly hurt another. He believes in
force, axe against lance, one cross-bow
against two swords, he believes in measurement,
power, division, blood, but not
the malevolent heart, so when he walks home
at 3 o’clock, on West 97th,
down our block past the junkie hotels,
the light burden of his pack on his back
dark-red as some area deep in the body
that is never seen, and the man says to him Hey, kid,
he answers, he meets force with force,
his arms so thin the light comes through the edges, he says
Yeah? And the man asks him a question, so
eager he is for this boy to explain the world,
the man says You know what cock means?
Our son answers politely and keeps walking,
he feels sorry for a man so dumb he has to ask a question like that,
and he knows it wasn’t a bad man,
or a dangerous one, just a regular man,
not dressed like a bum or talking like a wino,
and anyway this boy knows what’s what, he can
look deep into his own heart
and tell you the nature of the human—kindness,
courtesy, force.
Life with Sick Kids
One child coughs once
and is sick for eight weeks, then the other child coughs so
hard he nearly vomits, three weeks, and then
stops and then the first child coughs a first cough,
and then the other delicately and dryly begins to cough,
death taking them up and shaking them
as kids shake boxes at Christmas. So in bed on the
third day of the blood when it would be
almost safe to use nothing,
just a tiny door left open for a resourceful child,
I cannot see or feel or smell you, I keep
thinking I hear the unconceived one
cough a little introductory cough.
That Moment
It is almost too long ago to remember—
when I was a woman without children,
a person, really, like a figure standing in a field,
alone, dark against the pale crop.
The children were there, they were shadowy figures
outside the fence, indistinct as
distant blobs of faces at twilight.
I can’t remember, anymore,
the moment I turned to take them, my heel
turning on the earth, grinding the heads of the
stalks of grain under my foot, my
body suddenly swinging around as the
flat figure on a weathervane will
swerve when the wind changes. I can’t
remember the journey from the center of the field to the edge
or the cracking of the fence like the breaking down of the
borders of the world, or my stepping out of the
ploughed field altogether and
taking them in my arms as you’d take the
whites and yolks of eggs in your arms running
over you glutinous, streaked, slimy,
glazing you. I cannot remember that
instant when I gave my life to them
the way someone will suddenly give her life over to God
and I stood with them outside the universe
and then like a god I turned and brought them in.
L
ooking at Them Asleep
When I come home late at night and go in to kiss them,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her mouth slightly puffed, like one sated, but
slightly pouted like one who hasn’t had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his fine fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content—and I know if I wake her she’ll
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content—and I know if I wake her she’ll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he’ll jerk and say Don’t and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
What do you know, I say This girl, this boy.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, and other magazines. Her first book of poems, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living, was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches poetry workshops at New York University, Columbia University, and Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, in New York.
