ALSO BY SHARON OLDS
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002
The Unswept Room
Blood, Tin, Straw
The Wellspring
The Father
The Gold Cell
The Dead and the Living
Satan Says
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by Sharon Olds
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously 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.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olds, Sharon.
One secret thing / by Sharon Olds.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80437-2
I. Title.
PS3565.l34O54 2008
811′.54—dc22
2008019607
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Everything
PART ONE: War
War
1. Woman with the Lettuce
2. Legless Fighter Pilot
3. What Could Happen
4. The Dead
5. When He Came for the Family
6. The Signal
7. The Leader
8. The Smile
9. Free Shoes
10. The Body-Sniffers
11. His Crew
12. The Body
PART TWO: The Cannery
The Cannery, 1942–1945
Diagnosis
At Night
Behavior Chart
Calvinist Parents
Money
Fly on the Wall in the Puritan Home
Maiden Name
Men’s Singles, 1952
The Float
Freezer
The Bra
The Couldn’t
Home Theater, 1955
Paterfamilias
Easter 1960
PART THREE: Umbilicus
Umbilicus
When Our Firstborn Slept In
Toth Farry
Home Ec
The Space Heater
Barbarous Artifacts
Animal Dress
Royal Beauty Bright
Self-Exam
The Riser
Wooden Ode
The Scare
Pansy Coda
Last Words, Death Row, Circa 2030
Self-Portrait, Rear View
The Dead
Sleeves
Good Measure
PART FOUR: Cassiopeia
Cassiopeia
1. He Is Taken Away
2. The Music
3. The Ecstatic
4. Two Late Dialogues
Mom as Comet
Her Creed
5. Warily, Sportsman!
6. Little End Ode
7. Something Is Happening
8. Cassiopeia
PART FIVE: One Secret Thing
Still Life
One Secret Thing
The Last Evening
Last Hour
To See My Mother
When I Left Her
Western Wind
Satin Maroon
Nereid Elegy
A Note About the Author
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to the editors of the following publications where these poems, some of which have been revised, first appeared:
The American Poetry Review: “Money,” “Maiden Name,”
“Paterfamilias,” “When Our Firstborn Slept In,” “The Scare,”
“Pansy Coda,” “The Music,” “Two Late Dialogues,” “Little End Ode,” “Last Hour,” “Mom as Comet”
Antioch Review: “Free Shoes”
Brick: “The Float”
Five Points: “Behavior Chart,” “Good Measure”
Massachusetts Review: “The Body”
The Missouri Review: “What Could Happen”
Ms.: “One Secret Thing”
The New England Review: “The Leader”
The New Yorker: “Easter 1960,” “The Space Heater,” “Self-Exam,” “The Last Evening,” “Her Creed”
The Paris Review: “Calvinist Parents”
Ploughshares: “The Couldn’t”
Poetry: “Legless Fighter Pilot,” “When He Came for the Family,” “The Signal,” “Home Ec,” “Still Life”
Poetry London: “Animal Dress,” “Satin Maroon”
Tin House: “At Night”
Tri-Quarterly: “Western Wind”
Everything
Most of us are never conceived.
Many of us are never born—
we live in a private ocean for hours,
weeks, with our extra or missing limbs,
or holding our poor second head,
growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,
sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp
and whelk, are culled in our early months.
And some who are born live only for minutes,
others for two, or for three, summers,
or four, and when they go, everything
goes—the earth, the firmament—
and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.
PART ONE: War
War
1. Woman with the Lettuce
They are crowded in a line being shoved toward a truck.
Some seem stunned, some sick with fear.
She stands slightly outside the line,
black hat clamped on her head,
mouth compressed. In her hands she holds
an oversized lettuce, its white stems and
great, pale, veined leaves
unfolded in the dense air. She stares
directly at the camera, the large, delicate
plant in her grip, its glowing vanes
reaching out. Furious, she takes her
last chance to look right at us.
2. Legless Fighter Pilot
He takes his right calf in his hand,
lifts the whole leg up, straight,
turns, and swings it into the cockpit,
sliding into the seat. The left leg he
bends by hand at the knee, pulls it in, and
slams the hatch, then in his aircraft
he rises over the hills. In the sky
no one can walk, everyone
is a sitting duck, he banks and begins to hunt.
He is not afraid of anything now,
not even his coffin—hell, he is part
native oak already, and if he
lost his arms he’d replace them. All he
wants is to bag as many as he can,
crash them into the ground like birds into a sack with their
useless legs trailing out the mouth of it.
3. What Could Happen
When the men and women went into hiding,
they knew what could happen if the others caught them.
They knew their bodies might be undone,
their sexual organs taken as if
to destroy the mold so the human could not
be made anymore. They knew what the others
went for—the center of the body,
and not just for the agony and horror but to
send them crudely barren into death,
throwing those bodies down in the village at dawn
to show that all was ended. But each
ti
me the others dumped a body in the square,
a few more people took to the woods,
as if springing up, there,
from the loam dark as the body’s wound.
4. The Dead
The ground was frozen, the coffin-wood burned
for fuel. So the dead were covered with something
and taken on a child’s sled to the cemetery
in the subzero air. They lay on the snow,
some wrapped in rough cloth
bound with rope, like the tree’s ball of roots
in sheets, their gauze, tapered shapes
stiff as cocoons which will split down the center
when the new life inside is prepared;
but most lay like corpses, their coverings
coming loose, naked calves
hard as corded wood spilling
from under a tarp, a hand reaching out
as if to the bread made of glue and sawdust,
to the icy winter, and the siege.
5. When He Came for the Family
They looked at their daughter standing with her music
in her hand, the page covered with dots and
lines, with its shared language. They knew
families had been taken. What they did not know
was the way he would pick her cello up
by the scroll neck and take its amber
torso-shape and lift it and break it
against the fireplace. The brickwork crushed the
close-grained satiny wood, they stood and
stared at him.
6. The Signal
When they brought his body back, they told
his wife how he’d died:
the general thought they had taken the beach,
and sent in his last reserves. In the smokescreen,
the boats moved toward shore. Her husband
was the first man in the first boat
to move through the smoke and see the sand
dark with bodies, the tanks burning,
the guns thrown down, the landing craft
wrecked and floored with blood. In the path of the
bullets and shells from the shore, her husband had
put on a pair of white gloves
and turned his back on the enemy,
motioning to the boats behind him
to turn back. After everyone else
on his boat was dead
he continued to signal, then he, too,
was killed, but the other boats had seen him
and turned back. They gave his wife the medal,
and she buried him, and at night floated through
a wall of smoke, and saw him at a distance
standing in a boat, facing her,
the gloves blazing on his hands as he motioned her back.
7. The Leader
Seeing the wind at the airport blowing on his hair,
lifting it up where it was slicked down, you
want to say to the wind, Stop, that’s
the leader’s hair, but the wind keeps lifting it
and separating the thin strands and
fanning it out like a weed-head in the air.
His brows look bright in the airport glare,
his eyes are crinkled up against the sun, you
want to say to his eyes, Stop, you are
the leader’s eyes, close yourselves, but they are
on his side, no part of his body
can turn against him. His thumbnail is long and
curved—it will not slit his throat for the
sake of the million children; his feet in their
polished shoes won’t walk him into the
propeller and end the war. His heart won’t
cease to beat, even if it knows
whose heart it is—it has no loyalty to
other hearts, it has no future outside his body.
And you can’t suddenly tell his mind that it is
his mind, get out while it can,
it already knows that it’s his mind—
much of its space is occupied with the
plans for the marble memorial statues
when he dies of old age. They’ll place one
in every capital city of his nation
around the world—Lagos, Beijing,
São Paolo, New York, London, Baghdad,
Sydney, Paris, Jerusalem,
a giant statue of him, Friend to the Children
of the leader’s country—
which will mean all children, then,
all those living.
8. The Smile
The man hunched on the ground, holding
the arm of the corpse, is smiling. And the man
bending over, stabbing the chest,
a look of pleasant exertion on his face,
is smiling. The man lying on the ground is
staring up, shirt splattered black
like splashes around a well where the bucket has been
dipped and dipped. They hold his wrists, as if
displaying his span, a large bird
slung from its heavy wing tips,
and the handsome young man goes on stabbing
and smiling, and the other sits on the ground
holding the dead arm like a leash, smiling.
9. Free Shoes
The pairs of shoes stand in rows,
polished and jet, like coffins for small pets,
lined with off-white. Evacuated children
child after child after child, no parents
anywhere near. When it’s their turn,
they get a pair of new shoes
and the old ones are taken away.
Of course it is kind of the nice people
to give them the shoes. Of course it is better
to be here in the country, not there where the buildings
explode and hurl down pieces of children.
Of course, of course. This life that has been
given them like a task! This life, this
black bright narrow unbroken-in shoe.
10. The Body-Sniffers
Eventually, they found the people
who could tell by the smell whether or not
someone was alive in the ruins. They would crouch,
move their heads above holes in the rubble,
and after a while they’d say Yes, there is something,
someone. They’d inhale some more,
lying flat on the planks, the odor
trickling up, into their brains, and
sometimes they’d say, It’s too late, here.
Other times the blood was still flowing and
then the large beams would be hoisted, the
pipes cut, the bricks lifted,
foot by foot they’d go down and the sniffer would
say, Keep going, someone’s there! They’d dig day and
night without sleep to see the eyelids
flutter, to smell the fresh, dissolved salt.
11. His Crew
Burning, he kept the plane up
long enough for the crew to jump. He could
feel the thrust down, and the lift,
each time one of them leapt, full-term, the
parachutes unfolding and glistening, little
sacs of afterbirth. They drifted toward
what could be long lives, his fist
seared to the stick. When he’d felt all six
leave him, he put the nose down
and saw the earth coming up toward him,
green as a great basin of water
being lifted to his face.
12. The Body
The body lies, dropped down on the stones,
pieces of plastic and steel in it, it is
not breathing, it cannot make its
heart pump no matter how hard it tries.
It tries to move its left hand,
its left foot—its lips, tongue,
it cannot cry, it cannot feel,
the lovely one is gone, the one who
rode it, rider on a mount, the one who had
a name and spoke. It lies on the rocks in its
camouflage, canteen at its belt,
probably still holding water,
and it can’t do anything, it can’t even
get at the water, they will put it in a pit,
cover it over, it will never feel
that vivid one
wake in it.
PART TWO: The Cannery
The Cannery, 1942–1945
When we’d visit it, down the street,
in the grammar school, I was so young
I sat on my mother’s forearm, and gazed at the
stainless retort where the cylinders
of tinned iron and sheet metal,
hermetically sealed, glided, at a slant,
like a column of soldered soldiers, single-
file, down along the slatted chrome
ramp from the flame-sterilizers
in the requisitioned lunchroom. The woman
who ran that home-front cannery was
shorter than I from my perch, she was heavy, she had
short hair, and she moved with purpose,
there in her war-effort kitchen. I thought she had
invented the machine, and owned it, down would
soar, shoulder to shoulder, the ranks of
rations, as if we could see the clever
workings of her mind. When the war ended,
and the little factory was dismantled, she killed
herself. I didn’t know what it meant,
what she had done, as if she had canned
her own spirit. I wish I could thank her
for showing me a woman Hephaistos
at her forge fire. My mother held me up
as if to be blessed by her. I wish her
heaven could have been the earth she had been desiring.
Diagnosis
By the time I was six months old, she knew something
was wrong with me. I got looks on my face
she had not seen on any child
in the family, or the extended family,
or the neighborhood. My mother took me in
to the pediatrician with the kind hands,