Strike Sparks

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Strike Sparks Page 7

by Sharon Olds


  is powerful, each mouthful holds

  for a moment its amber agate shape,

  I think of the sweat I sipped from my father’s

  forehead the hour before his death. We talk about

  those last days—that I was waiting for him to die.

  You are lying on the couch, your underpants

  a luminous white, your hand resting

  relaxed, along the side of your penis,

  we talk about your father’s illness,

  your nipple like a pure circle of

  something risen to the surface of your chest.

  Even if we wanted to,

  we could not describe it,

  the end of the second glass when I sometimes

  weep and you start to get sleepy—I love

  to drink and cry with you, and end up

  sobbing to a sleeping man, your

  long body filling the couch and

  draped slightly over the ends, the

  untrained soft singing of your snore, it cannot be given.

  Yes, we know we will make love, but we’re

  not getting ready to make love,

  nor are we getting over making love,

  love is simply our element,

  it is the summer night, we are in it.

  Full Summer

  I paused, and paused, over your body,

  to feel the current of desire pull

  and pull through me. Our hair was still wet,

  mine like knotted wrack, it fell

  across you as I paused, a soaked coil

  around your glans. When one of your hairs

  dried, it lifted like a bare nerve.

  On the beach, above us, a cloud had appeared in

  the clear air, a clockwise loop coming

  in out of nothing, now the skin of your scrotum

  moved like a live being, an animal,

  I began to lick you, the foreskin lightly

  stuck in one spot, like a petal, I love

  to free it—just so—in joy,

  and to sip from the little crying lips

  at the tip. Then there was no more pausing,

  nor was this the taker,

  some new one came

  and sucked, and up from where I had been hiding I was

  drawn in a heavy spiral out of matter

  over into another world

  I had thought I would have to die to reach.

  Am and Am Not

  When I’m tilted forward, brushing my teeth,

  I glance down. We do not know

  ourselves. My cunt, like a hand, stroked him,

  such subtle, intricate movement. Central

  inside me this one I am and am not,

  not only like a palm, more like a snake’s

  reticulated body, rings of muscle—

  like the penis outside-in, its twin.

  Who is it? I lean against the sink, mouth open

  and burning with Colgate, nixie palate

  scoured with pond-mint; is it my soul

  in there, elastic as an early creature

  gone out on its own again, is it my

  soul’s throat? Its rings ripple

  in waves, as if it swallows, but what it

  swallows stays, and grows, and grows,

  we become one being, whom we hardly know,

  whom we know better than we know anyone

  else. And in the morning I look down. Who? What has—

  what?! Seeing just the skin of the belly—

  she is asleep in there, the soul, vertical

  undulant one, she is dancing upright in her dream.

  True Love

  In the middle of the night, when we get up

  after making love, we look at each other in

  complete friendship, we know so fully

  what the other has been doing. Bound to each other

  like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,

  bound with the tie of the delivery room,

  we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can

  hardly walk, I wobble through the granular

  shadowless air, I know where you are

  with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other

  with huge invisible threads, our sexes

  muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole

  body a sex—surely this

  is the most blessed time of my life,

  our children asleep in their beds, each fate

  like a vein of abiding mineral

  not discovered yet. I sit

  on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,

  I open the window and snow has fallen in a

  steep drift, against the pane, I

  look up, into it,

  a wall of cold crystals, silent

  and glistening, I quietly call to you

  and you come and hold my hand and I say

  I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.

  from Blood, Tin, Straw

  The Promise

  With the second drink, at the restaurant,

  holding hands on the bare table,

  we are at it again, renewing our promise

  to kill each other. You are drinking gin,

  night-blue juniper berry

  dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fumé,

  chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are

  taking on earth, we are part soil already,

  and wherever we are, we are also in our

  bed, fitted, naked, closely

  along each other, half passed out,

  after love, drifting back

  and forth across the border of consciousness,

  our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand

  tightens on the table. You’re a little afraid

  I’ll chicken out. What you do not want

  is to lie in a hospital bed for a year

  after a stroke, without being able

  to think or die, you do not want

  to be tied to a chair like your prim grandmother,

  cursing. The room is dim around us,

  ivory globes, pink curtains

  bound at the waist—and outside,

  a weightless, luminous, lifted-up

  summer twilight. I tell you you do not

  know me if you think I will not

  kill you. Think how we have floated together

  eye to eye, nipple to nipple,

  sex to sex, the halves of a creature

  drifting up to the lip of matter

  and over it—you know me from the bright, blood-

  flecked delivery room, if a lion

  had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes

  binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

  Know-Nothing

  Sometimes I think I know nothing about sex.

  All that I thought I was going to know,

  that I did not know, I still do not know.

  I think about this out of town,

  on hotel elevators crowded with men.

  The body of knowledge which lay somewhere

  ahead of me, now I do not know where it

  lies, or in the beds of strangers.

  I know of sexual love, with my beloved,

  but of men—I think there are women who know

  men, I can’t see what it is

  they know, but I feel in myself that I

  could know it, or could I have been a woman who

  would dare that. I don’t mean what she does

  with herself, or that she would know more pleasure,

  but she knows something true that I don’t know,

  she knows fucking with a stranger. I feel

  in awe of that, why is she not

  afraid, what if she did not like

  his touch, or what he said, how

  would she bear it? Or maybe she has mercy on pretty much

  anything a stranger would say or do,

  or maybe it is not mercy
, but sex,

  when she sees what he’s like, she enflames for that,

  and is afraid of nothing, wanting to touch

  stone desire, and know it, she is like

  a god, who could have sex with stranger

  after stranger—she could know men.

  But what of her womb, tender core

  of her being, what of her breasts’ stiff hearts,

  and her dense eggs, what if she falls

  in love? Maybe to know sex fully

  one has to risk being destroyed by it.

  Maybe only ruin could take

  its full measure, as death stands

  in the balance with birth, and ignorance with love.

  Dear Heart,

  How did you know to turn me over,

  then, when I couldn’t know to take

  the moment to turn and start to begin

  to finish, I was out there, far ahead

  of my body, far ahead of the earth,

  ahead of the moon—like someone on the other

  side of the moon, stepped off, facing space, I was

  floating out there, splayed, facing

  away, fucked, fucked, my face

  glistening and distorted pressed against the inner

  caul of the world. I was almost beyond

  pleasure, in a region of icy, absolute

  sensing, my open mouth and love-slimed

  cheeks stretching the membrane the way

  the face of the almost born can appear, still

  veiled in its casing, just inside

  the oval portal, pausing, about

  to split its glistering mask—you eased me

  back, drew me back into the human

  night, you turned me and the howling slowed, and at the

  crux of our joining, flower heads grew

  fast-motion against you, swelled and burst without

  tearing—ruinless death, each

  sepal, each petal, came to the naught

  of earth, our portion, in ecstasy, ash

  to fire to ash, dust to bloom to dust.

  19

  When we took the acid, his wife was off

  with someone else, there was a hole in their bedroom

  wall where the Steuben wedding owl

  had flown from one room right through into another,

  I was in love with his best friend, who had

  gone into a monastery

  after he’d deflowered me, so we

  knew each other: when he finished, under

  my palm, I could feel the circular ribs of his

  penis; I finished with my legs wrapped around his

  leg, even with my toes pointed, my

  feet reached only halfway down

  his calf, later I was lying on the bathroom

  floor, looking up at him, naked, he was

  6′6″, a decathlete,

  my eyes followed the inner line of his

  leg, up, up, up,

  up, up, up, up.

  Weeks later, he would pull a wall-phone

  out of a wall, he would cross the divider

  in his Mustang at 2 a.m. with me and go

  sixty, against traffic, crying, I could

  hardly hear what he said about the barbed

  wire and his father and his balls—but that

  acid night, we stayed up all night, I was

  not in love with him, so his beauty made me

  happy, we chattered, we chatted naked, he

  told me everything he liked

  about my body—and he liked everything—

  even the tiny gooseflesh bumps

  around my hard nipples,

  he said the way to make love to me

  would be from behind, with that sheer angle, his

  forefinger drew it, gently, the extreme

  hairpin curve of the skinny buttocks,

  he said it the way I thought an older

  cousin in a dream might give advice

  to a younger cousin, his fingertip

  barely missing my—whatever, in love, one would

  call the asshole—he regarded me with a

  savoring kindness, from a cleft of sweet lust in the

  human he actually looked at me

  and thought how I best should be fucked. Oooh.

  Oooh. It meant there was something to be done with me,

  something exactly right, he looked at me

  and saw it,

  willing to not be the one

  who did it—all night, he desired me and

  protected me, he gazed at my body and un-

  saw my parents’ loathing, pore by

  pore on my skin he closed that couple’s eyes.

  That Day

  None of the pain was sharp. The sash

  was pliant, its cotton blunt, like a bandage

  it held my wrist to the chair. And the fierce

  glazed string of the woven seat

  printed me in deep pink, but I was

  used to that, that matter could mark us

  and its marks dissolve. That day, no one touched me,

  it was a formal day, the nerves lay easy

  in their planched grooves. The hunger grew, but

  quietly, edgeless, a suckling in my stomach

  doubling, it was a calm day

  unfolding to its laws. Only the pleasure had been

  sharp—the tilt of the squat bottle

  over their bed, the way the ink

  lowered itself, onto the spread, I had

  felt its midnight, genie shape

  leave my chest, pouring forth, and it was

  India ink, the kind that does not come out,

  I sat attached to the chair like Daphne

  halfway out of the wood, and I read that blot.

  I read it all day, like a Nancy Drew I was

  in—they had said You won’t be fed

  till you say you’re sorry, I was strangely happy, I would

  never say I was sorry, I had left

  that life behind. So it didn’t surprise me when she

  came in slowly, holding a bowl that

  held what swayed and steamed, she sat and

  spoon-fed me, in silence, hot

  alphabet soup. Sharp pleasure

  of my wing-tip hands hung down beside me

  slack as I ate, sharp pleasure of the

  legible school of edible letters flowed

  in, over my taste-buds, B,

  O, F, K, G,

  I mashed the crescent moon of the C,

  caressed the E, reading with my tongue

  that boiled Braille—and she was almost kneeling to me

  and I wasn’t sorry. She was feeding the one

  who wasn’t sorry, the way you lay food

  at the foot of an image. I sat there, tied,

  taking in her offering

  and wildly reading as I ate, S S F

  T, L W B B P Q

  B, she dipped into my mouth the mild

  discordant fuel—she wanted me to thrive, and decipher.

  After Punishment Was Done with Me

  After punishment was done with me,

  after I would put my clothes back on, I’d go

  back to my room, close the door,

  and wander around, ending up

  on the floor sometimes, always, near the baseboard,

  where the vertical fall of the wall meets

  the level rule of the floor—I would put

  my face near that angle, and look at the dust

  and anything caught in the dust. I would see

  the wedding swags of old-lady-hair—

  pelmets carved on cenotaph granite—and

  cocoons of slough like tiny Kotexes

  wound and wound in toilet paper,

  I would see the anonymous crowds of grit, as if

  looking down into Piazza Navona

  from a mile above Il Duce, I would see

  a larval casing waisted in gold


  thin as the poorest gold wedding band,

  and a wasp’s dried thorax and legs wound love-ring

  with a pubic hair of my mother’s, I would see

  the coral-maroon of the ladybug’s back

  marked with its two, night genes,

  I would see a fly curled up, dried,

  its wings like the rabbit’s ears, or the deer’s.

  I would lie quiet and look at them,

  it was so peaceful there with them,

  I was not at all afraid of them,

  and my sadness for them didn’t matter.

  I would look at each piece of lint

  and half imagine being it,

  I would feel that I was looking at

  the universe from a great distance.

  Sometimes I’d pick up a Dresden fly

  and gaze at it closely, sometimes I’d idly play

  house with the miniature world, weddings and

  funerals with barbed body parts,

  awful births, but I did not want

  to disarrange that unerring deadness

  like a kind of goodness, corner of wetless

  grey waste, nothing the human

  would go for. Without desire or rage

  I would watch that dust celestium as the pain

  on my matter died and turned to spirit

  and wandered the cloud world of home,

  the ashes of the earth.

  What Is the Earth?

  The earth is a homeless person. Or

  the earth’s home is the atmosphere.

  Or the atmosphere is the earth’s clothing,

  layers of it, the earth wears all of it,

  the earth is a homeless person.

  Or the atmosphere is the earth’s cocoon,

  which it spun itself, the earth is a larvum.

  Or the atmosphere is the earth’s skin—

  earth, and atmosphere, one

  homeless one. Or its orbit is the earth’s

  home, or the path of the orbit just

  a path, the earth a homeless person.

  Or the gutter of the earth’s orbit is a circle

  of hell, the circle of the homeless. But the earth

  has a place, around the fire, the hearth

  of our star, the earth is at home, the earth

  is home to the homeless. For food, and warmth,

  and shelter, and health, they have earth and fire

  and air and water, for home they have

  the elements they are made of, as if

  each homeless one were an earth, made

  of milk and grain, like Ceres, and one

  could eat oneself—as if the human

 

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