by Sharon Olds
were a god, who could eat the earth, a god
of homelessness.
Leaving the Island
On the ferry, on the last morning of summer,
a father at the snack counter low in the boat
gets breakfast for the others. Here, let me drink some of
Mom’s coffee, so it won’t be so full
for you to carry, he says to his son,
a boy of ten or eleven. The boat
lies lower and lower in the water as the last
cars drive on, it tilts its massive
grey floor like the flat world. Then the
screaming starts, I carry four things,
and I only give you one, and you drop it,
what are you, a baby? a high, male
shrieking, and it doesn’t stop, Are you two?
Are you a baby? I give you one thing,
no one in the room seems to move for a second,
a steaming pool spreading on the floor, little
sea with its own waves, the boy
at the shore of it. Can’t you do anything
right? Are you two? Are you two?, the piercing
cry of the father. Go away,
go up to your mother, get out of here—
the purser swabbing the floor, the boy
not moving from where the first word touched him,
and I could not quite walk past him, I paused
and said I spilled my coffee on the deck, last trip,
it happens to us all. He turned to me,
his lips everted so the gums gleamed,
he hissed a guttural hiss, and in
a voice like Gollum’s or the Exorcist girl’s when she
made the stream of vomit and beamed it
eight feet straight into the minister’s mouth
he said Shut up, shut up, shut up, as if
protecting his father, peeling from himself
a thin wing of hate, and wrapping it
tightly around father and son, shielding them.
The Prepositions
When I started Junior High, I thought
I’d probably be a Behavior Problem
all my life, John Muir Grammar
the spawning grounds, the bad-seed bed, but
the first morning at Willard, the dawn
of 7th grade, they handed me a list
of forty-five prepositions, to learn
by heart. I stood in the central courtyard,
enclosed garden that grew cement,
my pupils followed the line of the arches
up and over, up and over, like
alpha waves, about, above,
across, along, among, around, an
odd comfort began, in me,
before, behind, below, beneath,
beside, between, I stood in that sandstone
square, and started to tame. Down,
from, in, into, near, I was
located there, watching the Moorish half-
circles rise and fall. Off,
on, onto, out, outside, we
came from 6th grades all over the city
to meet each other for the first time,
White tennis-club boys who did not
speak to me, White dorks
who did, Black student-council guys who’d gaze
off, above my head, and the Black
plump goof-off, who walked past and
suddenly flicked my sweater-front, I thought to shame me.
Over, past, since, through,
that was the year my father came home in the
middle of the night with those thick earthworms
of blood of his face, trilobites of
elegant gore, cornice and crisp
waist of the extinct form,
till, to, toward, under, the
lining of my uterus convoluted,
shapely and scarlet as the jointed leeches
of wound clinging to my father’s face in that
mask, unlike, until, up, I’d
walk, day and night, into
the Eden of the list, hortus enclosus where
everything had a place. I was in
relation to, upon, with, and when I
got to forty-five I could start over,
pull the hood of the list down over
my brain again. It was the first rest
I had had from my mind. My glance would run
slowly along the calm electro-
cardiogram of adobe cloister,
within, without, I’d repeat the prayer I’d
received, a place in the universe,
meaningless but a place, an exact location—
Telegraph, Woolsey, Colby, Russell—
Berkeley, 1956,
fourteen, the breaking of childhood, beginning of memory.
1954
Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt
he had put on her face. And her training bra
scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening,
kept saying it, training bra,
as if the cups of it had been calling
the breasts up, he buried her in it,
perhaps he had never bothered to take it
off, and they had found her underpants
in a garbage can. And I feared the word
eczema, like my acne and like
the X in the paper which marked her body,
as if he had killed her for not being flawless.
I feared his name, Burton Abbott,
the first name that was a last name,
as if he was not someone specific.
It was nothing one could learn from his face.
His face was dull and ordinary,
it took away what I’d thought I could count on
about evil. He looked thin, and lonely,
it was horrifying, he looked almost humble.
I felt awe that dirt was so impersonal,
and pity for the training bra,
pity and terror of eczema.
And I could not sit on my mother’s electric
blanket anymore, I began to have
a fear of electricity—
the good people, the parents, were going
to fry him to death. This was what
his parents had been telling us:
Burton Abbott, Burton Abbott,
death to the person, death to the home planet.
The worst thing would have been to think
of her, of what it had been to be her,
alive, to be walked, alive, into that cabin,
to look into those eyes, and see the human.
Cool Breeze
(for Joseph Davis Gilbert)
You talked to me a lot about your kid sister,
Rebecca, a.k.a. Reebabecka,
and you knew me as my sister’s kid sister,
fourteen, and a late bloomer, and homely,
you talked to me about your family,
and your dream of cutting an LP,
and the Juniors and Sophomores you were in love with, or who
were in love with you, or who maybe you had slept with—
they were White, as I was, but you called me Miss Shary
Cobb, Miss Cool Breeze Herself.
You didn’t mind I was in love with you,
you were Senior Class President.
And you would dance with me, astronomer
who pointed out to me the star
bright of the cervix, when we danced it became
exact to me, far inside me
in the night sky. And you would park with me,
you would draw my hand gently across you, you had
mercy on me, and on yourself. When you would
slide your hand up under my sweater,
my mouth would open, but I’d stop you, and you would
say, rather fondly, Protecting your sacred
virginity? And I would say Yes,
I could always tell you the t
ruth.
When the White cops broke up the dance in your neighborhood,
your friends worked to get us out the back
unseen, if the cops saw us together
they would hurt someone. We crouched behind a hedge,
and I began to understand
you were less safe than me. Squatting
and whispering, I understood, as if
the bending of our bodies was teaching me,
that everyone was against you—the ones I had called
everyone, the White men
and the White women, the grown-ups, the blind
and deaf. And when you died, your LP cut,
and you had married the beauty from your neighborhood,
when you went off the coast road with your White
lover, into the wind off the ocean,
your Jag end over end, catching fire—
I knew that my hands were not free of your
blood, brother—Reebabecka’s brother.
For and Against Knowledge
(for Christa MacAuliffe)
What happened to her? As long as it was she,
what did she see? Strapped in,
tilted back, so her back was toward
the planet she was leaving, feeling the Gs
press her with their enormous palm, did she
weep with excitement in the roar, and in
the lens of a tear glimpse for an instant
a disc of fire? If she were our daughter,
would I think about it, how she had died, was she
torn apart, was she burned—the way
I have wondered about the first seconds
of our girl’s life, when she was a cell a
cell had just entered, she hung in me
a ball of grey liquid, without nerves,
without eyes or memory, it was
she, I love her. So I want to slow it
down, and take each millisecond
up, take her, at each point,
in my mind’s arms—the first, final
shock hit, as if God touched
a thumb to her brain and it went out, like a mercy killing,
and then, when it was no longer she,
the flames came—as we burned my father
when he had left himself. Then the massive bloom unbuckled
and jumped, she was vaporized back
down to the level of the cell. And the spirit—
I have never understood the spirit,
all I know is the shape it takes,
the wavering flame of flesh. Those
who know about the spirit may tell you
where she is, and why. What I want
to do is to find every cell,
slip it out of the fishes’ mouths,
ash in the tree, soot in our eyes
where she enters our lives, I want to play it
backwards, burning jigsaw puzzle
of flesh suck in its million stars
to meet, in the sky, boiling metal
fly back
together, and cool.
Pull that rocket
back down
surely to earth, open the hatch
and draw them out like fresh-born creatures,
sort them out, family by family, go
away, disperse, do not meet here.
The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror
The man looked like himself, only more so,
his face lucent, his silence profound as if
inevitable, but the woman looked
like a different species from an hour before,
a sandhill crane or a heron, her eyes
skinned back, she looked insane with happiness.
After he got up, I looked at her,
lying on her back in the bed.
Her ribs and breasts and clavicles had
the molded look of a gladiator’s
torso-armor, formal bulge of the
pectoral, forged nipple, her deltoid
heron-elongated,
I couldn’t get her provenance
but the pelvic bone was wildly curled,
wrung, I could see she was a skeleton
in there, that hair on her body buoyant
though the woman was stopped completely, stilled as if
paralyzed. I looked at her face,
blood-darkened, it was a steady face,
I saw she was very good at staring
and could make up her mind to stare at me
until I would look away first.
I saw her bowled, suffused forehead,
her bony cheeks and jaws, I saw she could
watch her own house burn
without moving a muscle, I saw she could light
the pyre. She looked very much like her father, that
capillary-rich face, and very
much like her mother, the curlicues
at the corners of the features. She was very male
and very female,
very hermaphroditical,
I could see her in a temple, tying someone up
or being tied up, or being made nothing
or making someone nothing,
I saw she was full of cruelty
and full of kindness, brimming with it—
I had known but not known this, that she was human,
she had it all inside her, all of it.
She saw me seeing that, she liked that I saw it.
A full life—I saw her living it,
and then I saw her think of someone who
ignores her rather as her father ignored her,
and the clear, intransigent white of her eyes
went murky grey, the sections of her face pulled
away from each other like the continents
before they tore apart, long before they drifted.
I saw that she had been beaten, I saw her
looking away like a begging dog,
I averted my eyes, and turned my head
as the beloved came back, and came over to her
and came down to me, I looked into his iris
like looking at a rainstorm by moonrise, or a still
winter lake, just as its cleavages
take, or into crystal, when crystal
is forming, wet as nectar or milk
or semen, the first skein from a boy’s heart.
You Kindly
Because I felt too weak to move
you kindly moved for me, kneeling
and turning, until you could take my breast-tip in the
socket of your lips, and my womb went down
on itself, drew sharply over and over
to its tightest shape, the way, when newborns
nurse, the fist of the uterus
with each, milk, tug, powerfully
shuts. I saw your hand, near me, your
daily hand, your thumbnail,
the quiet hairs on your fingers—to see your
hand its ordinary self, when your mouth at my
breast was drawing sweet gashes of come
up from my womb made black fork-flashes of a
celibate’s lust shoot through me. And I couldn’t
lift my head, and you swiveled, and came down
close to me, delicate blunt
touch of your hard penis in long
caresses down my face, species
happiness, calm which gleams
with fearless anguished desire. It found
my pouring mouth, the back of my throat,
and the bright wall which opens. It seemed to
take us hours to move the bone
creatures so their gods could be fitted to each other,
and then, at last, home, root
in the earth, wing in the air. As it finished,
it seemed my sex was a grey flower
the color of the brain, smooth and glistening,
a complex calla or iris which you
were creating with
the errless digit
of your sex. But then, as it finished again,
one could not speak of a blossom, or the blossom
was stripped away, as if, until
that moment, the cunt had been clothed, still,
in the thinnest garment, and now was bare
or more than bare, silver wet-suit of
matter itself gone, nothing
there but the paradise flay. And then
more, that cannot be told—may be,
but cannot be, things that did not
have to do with me, as if some
wires crossed, and history
or war, or the witches possessed, or the end
of life were happening in me, or I was
in a borrowed body, I knew
what I could not know, did-was-done-to
what I cannot do-be-done-to, so when
we returned, I cried, afraid for a moment
I was dead, and had got my wish to come back,
once, and sleep with you, on a summer
afternoon, in an empty house
where no one could hear us.
I lowered the salt breasts of my eyes
to your mouth, and you sucked,
then I looked at your face, at its absence of unkindness,
its giving that absence off as a matter
I cannot name, I was seeing not you
but something that lives between us, that can live
only between us. I stroked back the hair in
pond and sex rivulets
from your forehead, gently raked it back
along your scalp,
I did not think of my father’s hair
in death, those oiled paths, I lay
along your length and did not think how he
did not love me, how he trained me not to be loved.
Where Will Love Go?
Where will love go? When my father
died, and my love could no longer shine
on the oily, drink-contused slopes of his skin,
then my love for him lived inside me,
and lived wherever the fog they made of him
coiled like a spirit. And when I die
my love for him will live in my vapor
and live in my children, some of it
still rubbed into the grain of the desk my father left me
and the oxblood pores of the leather chair which he
sat in, in a stupor, when I was a child, and then
gave me passionately after his death—our
souls seem locked in it, together,
two alloys in a metal, and we’re there
in the black and chrome workings of his forty-pound
1932 Underwood,
the trapezes stilled inside it on the desk
in front of the chair. Even when the children
