Strike Sparks

by Sharon Olds

  spider-dancing over hot air, and I

  said, You want to know about white people?

  I’ll tell you about white people,

  I lived in close proximity to them

  and I was them, that meanness they used on me

  was what I was made of. Out of the corner of my

  eye, I glimpsed myself for a second

  in a store window, a swirl of grey, a

  thirster after substance. My companions became

  quiet, as if they had pulled back,

  a bit, and were holding still, with wary

  courtesy. In that second, I could almost

  sense myself, whuffolk amok,

  one who wanted to win something

  in the war of the family, to rant in the faces

  of the war-struck about her home-front pain.

  It is hard to see oneself as dangerous

  and stupid, but what I had said was true,

  the people who had hurt me most were my makers,

  but there had not been what I saw now as a ring

  of haters around us, encircling us.

  I had a flash of knowledge of this

  on the sidewalk—as we kept going, I sensed

  two, living beings, and one half-

  idiot, a grey girl walking. Who did she

  think she was, to relish herself

  for hating herself, to savor, proudly,

  the luxury of hating her own people?

  All evening, I looked at my friends’

  womanly beauty, and manly beauty,

  and the table with its wines, and meats, and fruits,

  and flowers, as if we could go back to the beginning.

  Still Life in Landscape

  It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and

  half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright,

  a woman was lying on the highway, on her back,

  with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders

  so the back of her head touched her spine

  between her shoulder blades, her clothes

  mostly accidented off, and her

  leg gone, a tall bone

  sticking out of the stub of her thigh—

  this was her abandoned matter,

  my mother grabbed my head and turned it and

  clamped it into her chest, between

  her breasts. My father was driving—not sober

  but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of

  neutral twilight, broken glass

  on wet black macadam, an underlying

  midnight abristle with stars. This was

  the world—maybe the only one.

  The dead woman was not the person

  my father had recently almost run over,

  who had suddenly leapt away from our family

  car, jerking back from death,

  she was not I, she was not my mother,

  but maybe she was a model of the mortal,

  the elements ranged around her on the tar—

  glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.

  The Wedding Vow

  I did not stand at the altar, I stood

  at the foot of the chancel steps, with my beloved,

  and the minister stood on the top step

  holding the open Bible. The church

  was wood, painted ivory inside, no people—God’s

  stable perfectly cleaned. It was night,

  spring—outside, a moat of mud,

  and inside, from the rafters, flies

  fell onto the open Bible, and the minister

  tilted it and brushed them off. We stood

  beside each other, crying slightly

  with fear and awe. In truth, we had married

  that first night, in bed, we had been

  married by our bodies, but now we stood

  in history—what our bodies had said,

  mouth to mouth, we now said publicly,

  gathered together, death. We stood

  holding each other by the hand, yet I also

  stood as if alone, for a moment,

  just before the vow, though taken

  years before, took. It was a vow

  of the present and the future, and yet I felt it

  to have some touch on the distant past

  or the distant past on it, I felt

  the wordless, dry, crying ghost of my

  parents’ marriage there, somewhere

  in the echoing space—perhaps one of the

  plummeting flies, bouncing slightly

  as it hit forsaking all others, then was brushed

  away. I felt as if I had come

  to claim a promise—the sweetness I’d inferred

  from their sourness, and at the same time that I

  had come, congenitally unworthy, to beg.

  And yet, I had been working toward this hour

  all my life. And then it was time

  to speak—he was offering me, no matter

  what, his life. That is all I had to

  do, that evening, to accept the gift

  I had longed for—to say I had accepted it,

  as if being asked if I breathe. Do I take?

  I do. I take as he takes—we have been

  practicing this. Do you bear this pleasure? I do.

  His Costume

  Somehow I never stopped to notice

  that my father liked to dress as a woman.

  He had his sign language about women

  talking too much, and being stupid,

  but whenever there was a costume party

  he would dress like us, the tennis balls

  for breasts—balls for breasts—the pageboy

  blond wig, the lipstick, he would sway

  his body with moves of gracefulness

  as if one being could be the whole

  universe, its ends curving back to come

  up from behind it. Six feet, and maybe

  one-eighty, one-ninety, he had the shapely

  legs of a male Grable—in a short

  skirt, he leaned against a bookcase pillar

  nursing his fifth drink, gazing

  around from inside his mascara purdah

  with those salty eyes. The woman from next door

  had a tail and ears, she was covered with Reynolds Wrap,

  she was Kitty Foil, and my mother was in

  a teeny tuxedo, but he always won

  the prize. Those nights, he had a look of daring,

  as if he was getting away with something,

  a look of triumph, of having stolen

  back. And as far as I knew, he never threw

  up as a woman, or passed out, or made

  those signals of scorn with his hands, just leaned,

  voluptuous, at ease, deeply

  present, as if sensing his full potential, crossing

  over into himself, and back,

  over and back.

  First Weeks

  Those first weeks, I hardly knew how to

  love our daughter. Her face looked crushed,

  crumpled with worry—and not even

  despairing, but just disheartened, a look of

  endurance. The skin of her face was finely

  wrinkled, there were wisps of hair on her ears,

  she looked a little like a squirrel, suspicious,

  tranced. And smallish, 6.13,

  wizened—she looked as if she were wincing

  away from me without moving. The first

  moment I had seen her, my glasses off,

  in the delivery room, a blur of blood

  and blue skin, and limbs, I had known her,

  upside down, and they righted her, and there

  came that faint, almost sexual, wail, and her

  whole body flushed rose.

  When I saw her next, she was bound in cotton,

  someone else had cleaned her, wiped

  the inside of my body off herr />
  and combed her hair in narrow scary

  plough-lines. She was ten days early,

  sleepy, the breast engorged, standing out nearly

  even with the nipple, her lips would so much as

  approach it, it would hiss and spray.

  And when we took her home, she shrieked

  and whimpered, like a dream of a burn victim,

  and when she was quiet, she would lie there and peer, not quite

  anxiously. I didn’t blame her,

  she’d been born to my mother’s daughter. I would kneel

  and gaze at her, and pity her.

  All day I nursed her, all night I walked her,

  and napped, and nursed, and walked her. And then,

  one day, she looked at me, as if

  she knew me. She lay along my forearm, fed, and

  gazed at me as if remembering me,

  as if she had known me, and liked me, and was getting

  her memory back. When she smiled at me,

  delicate rictus like a birth-pain coming,

  I fell in love, I became human.

  The Clasp

  She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,

  we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,

  I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his

  face, again, and when I had her wrist

  in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for almost a

  second, to make an impression on her,

  to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even nearly

  savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing, the

  expression, into her, of my anger,

  “Never, never again,” the righteous

  chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very

  fast—grab, crush, crush,

  crush, release—and at the first extra

  force, she swung her head, as if checking

  who this was, and looked at me,

  and saw me—yes, this was her mom,

  her mom was doing this. Her dark,

  deeply open eyes took me

  in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment

  she learned me. This was her mother, one of the

  two whom she most loved, the two

  who loved her most, near the source of love

  was this.

  Diaphragm Aria

  It’s curious and sweet to slip it out

  and look inside, to see what’s there,

  like a treasure hunt, dimestore toys

  and dolls tucked into the root-floor of the woods,

  or tilt up a stone in the yard and find,

  in the groove of her path, the flame-brown newt. Now I

  read the shallow cup of dregs,

  shreds like clothes torn away in

  eagerness, cloth of the bodies, which rips

  to a cloud of threads. Here our daughter

  never picked her finicky way,

  here our son never somersaulted,

  here only our not-children

  advanced, and dropped, and surged forward

  and were cut down, there a coil

  of tail, here a ladyfinger, a

  curl, a bone of the twin. When I have reached

  into myself, and glistened out the dome,

  I search its planetarium sky

  for its weather, ivory nimbus, reach

  of summer showers—these are the heavens

  under which the grateful bodies

  went to earth, dense with contentment,

  moving, together, for those hour-long

  moments, in a mattery paradise,

  I gaze into the cumulus

  of spermicide, I bless the lollers who

  stay in that other sphere as we come

  like surf on the shore of it.

  The Window

  Our daughter calls me, in tears—like water

  being forced, under great pressure, from densest

  stone. I am mad at you, she whispers.

  You said in a poem that you’re a survivor,

  that’s O.K., but you said that you are

  a Jew, when you’re not, that’s so cheap. You’re right,

  I say, you’re so right. Did you see the Holocaust

  movie, she asks, in a stifled voice,

  there’s a window on the third floor of the barracks

  and I know it’s a little bathroom, I used it

  in Poland the day I was there, and she sobs,

  a sound like someone swallowing gravel.

  And the rooms hadn’t been dusted, it was

  as if everything was left as it was,

  and some of the same molecules

  might be there in the room. And there were exhibit cases,

  one with hair—hair. In my mind

  I see the landscape, behind glass,

  the human hills and mountains, the intimate

  crowning of a private life

  now a case of clouds, detritus,

  meshes. And there were eyeglasses,

  a huge pile of liking to read,

  and of liking books, and being able to see, and

  then … then there was a display case

  of suitcases, and an Orthodox guide was

  taking a tour through. She is able, while she cries,

  to speak, in a compressed, stopped-down voice

  as if a pebble could talk. He was telling

  a big class of Bar Mitzvah boys

  to look at the names on the suitcases—

  some of them had believed … they were going …

  on vacation, she says—or something like it.

  I cannot hear each word

  but sometimes just the creak of rock

  on water. I do not want to ask her

  to repeat. She seems to be saying she had to

  leave the room, to find a place

  to cry in, maybe the little bathroom,

  I feel as if I am there, near her,

  and am seeing, through her, the horror of the human,

  as if she is transparent, holding

  no gaze to herself. There were people not

  crying, just looking, she says, then she says

  so much about us is unbearable.

  We talk an hour, we are coming back

  up as if from inside the ground,

  I try to tell her it was not weakness

  in her, that it was love she felt,

  the helplessness of each life, and the

  dread of our species. Yeah yeah, she says,

  in the low voice of someone lately

  the young in the nest, maybe soon

  the nesting one—and that hour, within

  her view, the evidence of the wish

  that the ark be consumed—and no thought of herself

  to distract her, nothing distracts her, not even

  the breathing of her own body as she sees.

  Fish Oil

  One midnight, home late from work,

  the apartment reeked of fish boiled

  in oil. All the windows were shut,

  and all the doors were open—up

  from the pan and spatula rose a thick

  helix of cod and olive. My husband

  slept. I opened the windows and shut

  the doors and put the plates in the sink

  and oodled Palmolive all over. The next

  day I fishwifed to a friend, and she said,

  Someone might live with that, and come to

  love the smell of a fry. And that evening,

  I looked at my beloved, and who he is

  touched me in the core of my heart. I sought

  a bottle of extra-extra virgin,

  and a recipe for sea fillet in

  olive-branch juice, I filled the rooms with

  swirls of finny perfume, the outlines

  in the sand the early Christians drew,

  the loop meaning safety, meaning me too,

  I remembered my paren
ts’ frowns at any

  whiff of savor outside the kitchen,

  the Calvinist shudder, in that house, at the sweet

  grease of life. I had come to my mate

  a shocked being, agog, a salt

  dab in his creel, girl in oil,

  his dish. I had not known that one

  could approve of someone entirely—one could

  wake to the pungent day, one could awake

  from the dream of judgment.

  Wonder as Wander

  At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,

  my mother potters around her house.

  Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one

  there, no one to tell what to do,

  she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,

  fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly

  throws out her arms and screams—high notes

  lying here and there on the carpets

  like bodies touched by a downed wire,

  she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through

  the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.

  I feel, now, that I do not know her,

  and for all my staring, I have not seen her

  —like the song she sang, when we were small,

  I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,

  how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,

  for poor lonely people, like you, and like I

  —on the slow evenings alone, when she delays

  and delays her supper, walking the familiar

  halls past the mirrors and night windows,

  I wonder if my mother is tasting a life

  beyond this life—not heaven, her late

  beloved is absent, her father absent,

  and her staff is absent, maybe this is earth

  alone, as she had not experienced it,

  as if she is one of the poor lonely people,

  as if she is born to die. I hold fast

  to the thought of her, wandering in her house,

  a luna moth in a chambered cage.

  Fifty years ago, I’d squat in her

  garden, with her Red Queens, and try

  to sense the flyways of the fairies as they kept

  the pollen flowing on its local paths,

  and our breaths on their course of puffs—they kept

  our eyes wide with seeing what we

  could see, and not seeing what we could not see.

  The Shyness

  Then, when we were joined, I became

  shyer. I became completed, joyful,

  and shyer. I may have shone more, reflected

  more, and from deep inside there rose

  some glow passing steadily through me, but I was not