by Sharon Olds
have died, our love will live in their children
and still be here in the arm of the chair,
locked in it, like the secret structure of matter,
but what if we ruin everything,
the earth burning like a human body,
storms of soot wreathing it
in permanent winter? Where will love go?
Will the smoke be made of animal love,
will the clouds of roasted ice, circling
the globe, be all that is left of love,
will the sphere of cold, turning ash,
seen by no one, heard by no one,
hold all
our love? Then love
is powerless, and means nothing.
The Protestor
(for Bob Stein)
We were driving north, through the snow, you said
you had turned twenty-one during Vietnam, you were
1-A. The road curved
and curved back, the branches laden,
you said you had decided not to go
to Canada. Which meant you’d decided to
go to jail, a slender guy of
twenty-one, which meant you’d decided to be
raped rather than to kill, if it was their
life or your ass, it was your ass.
We drove in silence, such soft snow
so heavy borne-down. That was when I’d come to
know I loved the land of my birth—
when the men had to leave, they could never come back,
I looked and loved every American
needle on every American tree, I thought
my soul was in it. But if I were taken and
used, taken and used, I think
my soul would die, I think I’d be easily broken,
the work of my life over. And you’d said,
This is the work of my life, to say,
with my body itself, You fuckers you cannot
tell me who to kill. As if there were a
spirit free of the body, safe from it.
After a while, you talked about your family,
not starting, as I had, with
husband and kids, leaving everyone else out—
you started with your grandparents
and worked your way back, away from yourself,
deeper and deeper into Europe, into
the Middle East, the holy book
buried sometimes in the garden, sometimes
swallowed and carried in the ark of the body itself.
The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb
Whatever he needs, he has or doesn’t
have by now.
Whatever the world is going to do to him
it has started to do. With a pencil and two
Hardy Boys and a peanut butter sandwich and
grapes he is on his way, there is nothing
more we can do for him. Whatever is
stored in his heart, he can use, now.
Whatever he has laid up in his mind
he can call on. What he does not have
he can lack. The bus gets smaller and smaller, as one
folds a flag at the end of a ceremony,
onto itself, and onto itself, until
only a triangle wedge remains.
Whatever his exuberant soul
can do for him, it is doing right now.
Whatever his arrogance can do
it is doing to him. Everything
that’s been done to him, he will now do.
Everything that’s been placed in him will
come out, now, the contents of a trunk
unpacked and lined up on a bunk in the underpine light.
The Talkers
All week, we talked. Born in the same
year and hospital we had so much to catch
up on we couldn’t stop, we talked
in the morning on the porch, when I combed my hair
and flung the comb-hair out into the air, and it
floated down the slope, toward the valley.
We talked while walking to the car, talked
over its mild, belled roof,
while opening the doors, then ducked down
and there we were, bent toward the interior, talking.
Meeting, in the middle of the day,
the first thing when we saw each other
we opened our mouths. All day,
we sang to each other the level music
of spoken language. Even while we ate
we did not pause, I’d speak to him through
the broken body of the butter cookie,
gently spraying him with crumbs. We talked
and walked, we leaned against the opposite sides of the
car and talked in the parking lot until
everyone had driven off, we clung to its
maroon raft and started a new subject.
We did not talk about his wife, much,
or my husband, but to everything else
we turned the workings of our lips and tongues
—up to our necks in the hot tub, or
walking up the steep road,
stepping into the hot dust as if
down into the ions of a wing, and on the
sand, next to each other, as we turned
the turns that upon each other would have been the
turnings of joy—even under
water there trailed from our mouths the delicate
chains of our sentences. But mostly at night, and
far into the night, we talked until we
dropped, as if, stopping for an instant, we might have
moved right toward each other. Today,
he said he felt he could talk to me forever,
it must be the way the angels live,
sitting across from each other, deep
in the bliss of their shared spirit. My God,
they are not going to touch each other.
First Thanksgiving
When she comes back, from college, I will see
the skin of her upper arms, cool,
matte, glossy. She will hug me, my old
soupy chest against her breasts,
I will smell her hair! She will sleep in this apartment,
her sleep like an untamed, good object, like a
soul in a body. She came into my life the
second great arrival, fresh
from the other world—which lay, from within him,
within me. Those nights, I fed her to sleep,
week after week, the moon rising,
and setting, and waxing—whirling, over the months,
in a steady blur, around our planet.
Now she doesn’t need love like that, she has
had it. She will walk in glowing, we will talk,
and then, when she’s fast asleep, I’ll exult
to have her in that room again,
behind that door! As a child, I caught
bees, by the wings, and held them, some seconds,
looked into their wild faces,
listened to them sing, then tossed them back
into the air—I remember the moment the
arc of my toss swerved, and they entered
the corrected curve of their departure.
The Native
This touching of him, on the borders of sleep,
my sternum and hipbones fitted to his tapered
back, my lap curled to his buttocks,
folded around them like a wing with an umber
eye-spot,
it feels to me like the most real thing,
my hand like elements on him, like
the waters stroking along him inside
his mother, without language, his large
eyes unsated ungrieving not even conscious yet,
the wind traveling the contours of the world,
a wind that comes when those who loved
the dead are allowed to touc
h them again. This feels like
who I am, I am the caressing of him,
and maybe especially this caressing,
gentle sweeping at the borders of sex,
sweeper of its sills in half-sleep, I
am the curve of his buttock, supple fork-
lightning of each hair, follicle
and pore, and the underlying bone,
the death-god of the skeleton,
and the intricate, thrilling anus, like a
character on a landscape, knob-end
of one of the long drool-bones of the spirit
running the length of the body, and then—
but when we cross from the back of the body
under, then this is over, till the next
morning or night when it is back again,
my home, colorless bliss, which I quietly
walk. I saw it in the Bible, in a sideways
oval, sepia and white, the hills
of the peaceable kingdom, its stream and live oak,
my eyes strolled it, and now my hand
walks, to and fro in the earth
and up and down in it, I am opposite-
Satan, I do not want to rule,
only to praise. I think I did not
want to be born,
I did not want to be conceived,
I held to nothing, to its dense parental
fur. Slowly I was pulled away,
but I would not let go, perhaps they had to
knock me off with a stick like someone
clinging to a live, downed wire,
I came away with the skin of the other
world on my palms, and at night, when I touch him,
wander on him, hold to him, and move
on and hold to him, I feel I am home again.
The Knowing
Afterwards, when we have slept, paradise-
comaed, and woken, we lie a long time
looking at each other.
I do not know what he sees, but I see
eyes of quiet evenness
and endurance, a patience like the dignity
of matter. I love the open ocean
blue-grey-green of his iris, I love
the curve of it against the white,
that curve the sight of what has caused me
to come, when he’s quite still, deep
inside me. I have never seen a curve
like that, except our sphere, from outer
space. I don’t know where he got
his steadiness as if without self-regard,
almost without self, and yet
he chose one woman, instead of the others.
By knowing him, I get to know
the purity of the animal
which mates for life. Sometimes he is slightly
smiling, but mostly he just gazes at me gazing,
his entire face lit. I love
to see it change if I cry—there is no worry,
no pity, a graver radiance. If we
are on our backs, side by side,
with our faces turned fully to face each other,
I can hear a tear from my lower eye
hit the sheet, as if it is an early day on earth,
and then the upper eye’s tears
braid and sluice down through the lower eyebrow
like the invention of farming, irrigation, a non-nomadic people.
I am so lucky that I can know him.
This is the only way to know him.
I am the only one who knows him.
When I wake again, he is still looking at me,
as if he is eternal. For an hour
we wake and doze, and slowly I know
that though we are sated, though we are hardly
touching, this is the coming that the other
brought us to the edge of—we are entering,
deeper and deeper, gaze by gaze,
this place beyond the other places,
beyond the body itself, we are making
love.
from The Unswept Room
Kindergarten Abecedarian
I thought what I had to do was to read
the very long word, over the chalkboard,
ab-kedev-gi-hij-klem-nop-qurs-
tuv-wix-yiz, but what I had to do
was to look at a crescent moon-shape and to go
k k k k with my mind. It was strange,
like other things—that a very large Boy owned everything,
even a fire, where he could put me for the thoughts
in my head. Each day, I tried to read
the world, to find his name in it,
the trees bending in cursive, the bees
looping their sky script. Crescent moon
was k-k-k. Cereal bowl
uh-uh-uh. Cap-gun puh-
puh-puh. K-k, uh-uh, puh-puh,
kk-uhh-puhh, kk-uhh-puhh—
cup. Would God be mad? I had made
a false cup, in my mind, and although
he had made my mind, and owned it, maybe this was
not his cup, maybe he could not
put this cup in hell, and make it
scream the cup-scream. Maybe the paper
world was ours, as the actual one was his—
I was becoming a reader. For a moment I almost remember it,
when I stood back, on the other side
of the alphabet, a-b-c-d-
e-f-g, and took that first
step in, h-i-j-k
l-m-n-o-p, and stood astride
the line of the border of literacy,
q-r-s, t-u-v,
I would work for a life of this, I would ask
sanctuary: w, x, y, z.
Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.
After Marcus Licinius Crassus
defeated the army of Spartacus,
he crucified 6,000 men.
That is what the records say,
as if he drove in the 18,000
nails himself. I wonder how
he felt, that day, if he went outside
among them, if he walked that human
woods. I think he stayed in his tent
and drank, and maybe copulated,
hearing the singing being done for him,
the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one
remove, to the six-thousandth power.
And maybe he looked out, sometimes,
to see the rows of instruments,
his orchard, the earth bristling with it
as if a patch in his brain had itched
and this was his way of scratching it
directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,
and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,
and now had found redress for it,
and voice for it. I speak as a monster,
someone who today has thought at length
about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling
nothing while so much is being
felt, his hot lightness of spirit
in being free to walk around
while other are nailed above the earth.
It may have been the happiest day
of his life. If he had suddenly cut
his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would
have woken up to what he was doing.
It is frightening to think of him suddenly
seeing what he was, to think of him running
outside, to try to take them down,
one man to save 6,000.
If he could have lowered one,
and seen the eyes when the level of pain
dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,
wouldn’t that have opened in him
the wild terror of understanding
the other? But then he would have had
5,999
to go. Probably it almost never
happens, that a Marcus Crassus
wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused
to his l
iving dream, lifted the flap
and stood and looked out, at the rustling, creaking
living field—his, like an external
organ, a heart.
5¢ a Peek
The day my class was to go to the circus,
I sidled into the bathroom, early,
and stood on tiptoe, up into the bottom
corner of the mirror, and leaned on the sink,
and slowly cut off my eyelashes
down close to the eyelid. I had no idea what I was
doing, or why, I studied the effect
—not bad, a little stark—but when I saw the effect
on my mother, not just anger, but pity
and horror, I was interested.
I think I had almost given up on being
a girl, on trying to grow up to be a woman like my mother,
I wanted to get disadopted
and go home to be the baby with the calf’s head,
home to my birth-mother the bearded lady,
my father the sword swallower stopped mid-swallow,
one with the sword. I had tried to act normal,
but when the inspiration came
I felt I was meant to act on it,
to look at my mom with my gaze trimmed to a seer’s
and see her see me for an instant, see
her irises contract. I did not
imagine I could ever leave my mother,
mostly I was her, in distorted form,
but at least for that second the itsy scissors
spoke to her with their birdy beak,
skreeek, skreeek, witch whinge. And when
my lashes grew back, no thicker no thinner no
shorter no longer, my mother sat me
down, and taught me to bat them, to look
sidelong, blindly, and shudder them at seven beats a second.
Grey Girl
(for Yusef Komunyakaa and Toi Derricotte)
We were walking down Park, on the grates over
the exhaust ducts of the lavish apartments,
we were walking on air, on iron bars,
three abreast—four breasts,
two on either side of the man
who had survived through various wars,
my friend and I proud to walk him through the
evening after his reading. Our skirts
faffled, we were tall, we were his color guard, his
woman of color and woman of no
color guard, we were talking about
family and race, and a greed or lust
rose in me to talk about
disliking myself. I was crouching slightly,
