THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2012 by Sharon Olds
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Cover image: The Stags' Leap design is a registered trademark of Treasury Wine Estates. Used with permission.
Cover design by Chip Kidd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olds, Sharon.
Stag’s leap / by Sharon Olds.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Poems.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95991-1
I. Title.
PS3565.L34S73 2012
811.54—dc23 2012004426
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
January–December
While He Told Me
Unspeakable
The Flurry
Material Ode
Gramercy
Telling My Mother
Silence, with Two Texts
The Last Hour
Last Look
Stag’s Leap
Known to Be Left
Object Loss
Poem for the Breasts
Winter
Not Going to Him
Pain I Did Not
The Worst Thing
Frontis Nulla Fides
On the Hearth of the Broken Home
Love
The Healers
Left-Wife Goose
Something That Keeps
The Easel
Approaching Godthåb
Spring
Once in a While I Gave Up
To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now
French Bra
My Son’s Father’s Smile
Not Quiet Enough
Summer
Sea-Level Elegy
Sleekit Cowrin’
Tiny Siren
Attempted Banquet
Fall
The Haircut
Crazy
Discandied
Bruise Ghazal
Years Later
On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult
Maritime
Slowly He Starts
Red Sea
Running into You
I’d Ask Him for It
The Shore
Poem of Thanks
Left-Wife Bop
Years Later
September 2001, New York City
What Left?
A Note About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, where some of the poems in this book first appeared.
Poetry: “The Flurry”
The New Yorker: “Stag’s Leap,” “Silence, with Two Texts,” “On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult”
Poetry London: “Bruise Ghazal,” “Sleekit Cowrin’ ”
Southern Review: “Slowly He Starts,” “The Healers”
TriQuarterly: “To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now,” “Sea-Level Elegy”
Slate: “Pain I Did Not”
Green Mountain Review: “Something That Keeps”
The Atlantic Monthly: “September 2001, New York City”
The American Poetry Review: “While He Told Me,” “Last Look,” “Material Ode,” “Years Later,” “What Left?,” “The Worst Thing”
Five Points: “Unspeakable”
Tracking the Storm: “Object Loss”
Brick: “I’d Ask Him for It”
Gulf Coast: “Left-Wife Goose”
Threepenny Review: “Discandied”
Ploughshares: “Poem for the Breasts”
Ontario Review: “Known to Be Left”
Tin House: “On the Hearth of the Broken Home”
This book’s title, with its singular stag, is a play on the name of the winery Stags’ Leap. The author is grateful to the makers of Stags’ Leap for generously sharing the image from their label, and for their wines.
January–December
While He Told Me
While he told me, I looked from small thing
to small thing, in our room, the face
of the bedside clock, the sepia postcard
of a woman bending down to a lily.
Later, when we took off our clothes, I saw
his deep navel, and the cindery lichen
skin between the male breasts, and from
outside the shower curtain’s terrible membrane
I called out something like flirting to him,
and he smiled. Before I turned out the light,
he touched my face, then turned away,
then the dark. Then every scene I thought of
I visited accompanied by a death-spirit,
everything was chilled with it,
each time I woke, I lay in dreading
bliss to feel and hear him sigh
and snore. Near sunrise, behind overcast, he got
up to go in and read on the couch,
as he often did,
and in a while I followed him,
as I often had,
and snoozed on him, while he read, and he laid
an arm across my back. When I opened
my eyes, I saw two tulips stretched
away from each other extreme in the old
vase with the grotto carved out of a hill
and a person in it, underground,
praying, my imagined shepherd in make-believe paradise.
Unspeakable
Now I come to look at love
in a new way, now that I know I’m not
standing in its light. I want to ask my
almost-no-longer husband what it’s like to not
love, but he does not want to talk about it,
he wants a stillness at the end of it.
And sometimes I feel as if, already,
I am not here—to stand in his thirty-year
sight, and not in love’s sight,
I feel an invisibility
like a neutron in a cloud chamber buried in a mile-long
accelerator, where what cannot
be seen is inferred by what the visible
does. After the alarm goes off,
I stroke him, my hand feels like a singer
who sings along him, as if it is
his flesh that’s singing, in its full range,
tenor of the higher vertebrae,
baritone, bass, contrabass.
I want to say to him, now, What
was it like, to love me—when you looked at me,
what did you see? When he loved me, I looked
out at the world as if from inside
a profound dwelling, like a burrow, or a well, I’d gaze
up, at noon, and see Orion
shining—when I thought he loved me, when I thought
we were joined not just for breath’s time,
but for the long continuance,
the hard candies of femur and stone,
the fastnesses. He shows no anger,
I show no anger but in flashes of humor,
all is courtesy and horror. And after
the first minute, when I say, Is this about
her, and he says, No, it’s about
you, we do not speak of her.
The Flurry
When we talk about when to tell the kids,
we are so to
gether, so concentrated.
I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m
the killer”—taking my wrist—he says,
holding it. He is sitting on the couch,
the worn indigo chintz around him,
rich as a night tide, with jellies,
I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him
as if within some chamber of matedness,
some dust I carry around me. Tonight,
to breathe its Magellanic field is less
painful, maybe because he is drinking
a wine grown where I was born—fog,
eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m
sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch
my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want
to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that,
I tell him I will try to fall out of
love with him, but I feel I will love him
all my life. He says he loves me
of tears mount to the acrobat platforms
of my ducts and do their burning leaps,
some of them jump straight sideways, and for a
moment, I imagine a flurry
of tears like a wirra of knives thrown
at a figure to outline it—a heart’s spurt
of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod
to it, it is my hope.
Material Ode
O tulle, O taffeta, O grosgrain—
I call upon you now, girls,
of fabrics and the woman I sing. My husband
had said he was probably going to leave me—not
for sure, but likely, maybe—and no, it did not
have to do with her. O satin, O
sateen, O velvet, O fucking velveeta—
the day of the doctors’ dress-up dance,
the annual folderol, the lace,
the net, he said it would be hard for her
to see me there, dancing with him,
would I mind not going. And since I’d been
for thirty years enarming him,
I enarmed him further—Arma, Virumque,
sackcloth, ashen embroidery! As he
put on his tux, I saw his slight
smirk into the mirror, as he did his bow tie,
but after more than three decades, you have some
affection for each other’s little faults,
and it suited me to cherish the belief
no meanness could happen between us. Fifty-
fifty we had made the marriage,
fifty-fifty its demise. And when he came
home and shed his skin, Reader,
I slept with him, thinking it meant
he was back, his body was speaking for him,
and as it spoke, its familiar sang
from the floor, the old-boy tie. O silk,
O slub, O cocoon stolen. It is something
our species does, isn’t it,
we take what we can. Or else there’d be grubs
who kept people, in rooms, to produce
placentas for the larvae’s use, there would be
a cow who would draw from our wombs our unborn
offspring, to make of them shoes for a calf.
O bunny-pajamas of children! Love
where loved. O babies’ flannel sleeper
with a slice of cherry pie on it.
Love only where loved! O newborn suit
with a smiling worm over the heart, it is
forbidden to love where we are not loved.
Gramercy
The last time we slept together—
and then I can’t remember when
it was, I used to be a clock
of sleeping together, and now it drifts,
in me, somewhere, the knowledge, in one of those
washes on maps of deserts, those spacious
wastes—the last time, he paused,
at some rest stop, some interval
between the unrollings, he put his palm
on my back, between the shoulder blades.
It was as if he were suing for peace,
asking if this could be over—maybe not
just this time, but over. He was solid
within me, suing for peace. And I
subsided, but then my bright tail
lolloped again, and I whispered, Just one
more?, and his indulgent grunt
seemed, to me, to have pleasure, and even
affection, in it—and my life, as it
was incorporated in flesh, was burst with the
sweet smashes again. And then
we lay and looked at each other—or I looked
at him, into his eyes. Maybe that
was the last time—not knowing
it was last, not solemn, yet that signal given,
that hand laid down on my back, not a gauntlet
but a formal petition for reprieve, a sign for Grant Mercy.
Telling My Mother
Outside her window, a cypress, under
the weight of the Pacific wind,
was bending luxuriously. To tell
my mother that my husband is leaving me…
I took her on a walk, taking her fleshless
hand like a passerine’s claw, I bought her
a doughnut and a hairnet, I fed her. On the gnarled
magnolia, in the fog, the blossoms and buds were like
all the moons in one night—full,
gibbous, crescent. I’d practiced the speech,
bringing her up toward the truth slowly,
preparing her. And the moment I told her,
she looked at me in shock and dismay.
But when will I ever see him again?!
and steadied us, joking. Above her spruce, through the
coastal mist, for a moment, a small,
dry, sandy, glistering star. Then I
felt in my whole body, for a second,
that I have not loved enough—I could almost
see my husband’s long shape,
wraithing up. I did not know him,
I did not work not to lose him, and I lost him,
and I’ve told my mother. And it’s clear from her harrowed
sorrowing cheeks and childhood mountain-lake
eyes that she loves me. So the men are gone,
and I’m back with Mom. I always feared this would happen,
I thought it would be a pure horror,
but it’s just home, Mom’s house
and garden, earth, olive and willow,
beech, orchid, and the paperweight
dusted with opal, inside it the arms of a
nebula raking its heavens with a soft screaming.
Silence, with Two Texts
When we lived together, the silence in the home
was denser than the silence would be
after he left. Before, the silence
was like a large commotion of industry
at a distance, like the downroar of mining. When he went,
I studied my once-husband’s silence like an almost
holy thing, the call of a newborn born
mute. Text: “Though its presence is detected
by the absence of what it negates, silence
possesses a power which presages fear
for those in its midst. Unseen, unheard,
unfathomable, silence dis-
concerts because it conceals.” Text:
“The waters compassed me about, even to
the soul: the depth closed me round
about, the weeds were wrapped about
my head.” I lived alongside him, in his hush
and reserve, sometimes I teased him, calling his
abstracted mask his Alligator Look,
seeking how to accept him as
he was, under the law
that he could not
speak—and when I shrieked against the law
he shrinked down into its absolute,
he rose from its departure gate.
And he seemed almost like a hero, to me,
living, as I was, under the law
that I could not see the one I had chosen
but only consort with him as a being
fixed as an element, almost
ideal, no envy or meanness. In the last
weeks, by day we moved through the tearing
apart, along its length, of the union,
and by night silence lay down with blindness,
and sang, and saw.
The Last Hour
Suddenly, the last hour
before he took me to the airport, he stood up,
bumping the table, and took a step
toward me, and like a figure in an early
science fiction movie he leaned
forward and down, and opened an arm,
knocking my breast, and he tried to take some
hold of me, I stood and we stumbled,
and then we stood, around our core, his
hoarse cry of awe, at the center,
at the end, of our life. Quickly, then,
the worst was over, I could comfort him,
holding his heart in place from the back
and smoothing it from the front, his own
life continuing, and what had
bound him, around his heart—and bound him
to me—now lying on and around us,
sea-water, rust, light, shards,
the little eternal curls of eros
beaten out straight.
Last Look
In the last minute of our marriage, I looked into
his eyes. All that day until then, I had been
comforting him, for the shock he was in
at his pain—the act of leaving me
took him back, to his own early
losses. But now it was time to go beyond
comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,
still, like the first ocean, wherein
the blue-green algae came into their early
language, his sea-wide iris still
essential, for me, with the depths in which
our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,
on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland
nectar of our milk—our milk. In his gaze,
rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-