ALSO BY SHARON OLDS
Satan Says
The Dead and the Living
The Gold Cell
The Father
The Wellspring
Blood, Tin, Straw
The Unswept Room
One Secret Thing
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2004 by Sharon Olds
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. 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. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of Pittsburgh Press for permission to reprint “Indictment of Senior Officials,” “The Sisters of Sexual Treasure,” “Station,” “Monarchs,” “Infinite Bliss,” “The Language of the Brag,” “The Talk,” and “I Could Not Tell” from Satan Says by Sharon Olds. Copyright © 1980 by Sharon Olds. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
All other poems in this collection have been previously published in the following Alfred A. Knopf works: The Dead and the Living (1984); The Gold Cell (1987); The Father (1992); The Wellspring (1996); Blood, Tin, Straw (1999); The Unswept Room (2002)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Olds, Sharon.
Strike sparks: selected poems, 1980–2002 / Sharon Olds.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-54760-6
I. Title.
PS3565.l34A6 2004
811′.5—dc2
2004044150
Published October 4, 2004
v3.1
For Phil and Franny
I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hip, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
from Satan Says (1980)
Indictment of Senior Officers
The Sisters of Sexual Treasure
Station
Monarchs
Infinite Bliss
The Language of the Brag
The Talk
I Could Not Tell
from The Dead and the Living (1984)
Ideographs
Photograph of the Girl
Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921
Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This Once
Miscarriage
My Father Snoring
The Moment
The Connoisseuse of Slugs
New Mother
Sex Without Love
Ecstasy
Exclusive
Rite of Passage
35/10
The Missing Boy
Bestiary
The One Girl at the Boys’ Party
from The Gold Cell (1987)
Summer Solstice, New York City
On the Subway
The Food-Thief
The Girl
The Pope’s Penis
When
I Go Back to May 1937
Alcatraz
Why My Mother Made Me
After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood
Cambridge Elegy
Topography
I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror
The Moment the Two Worlds Meet
Little Things
The Month of June: 13½
Looking at Them Asleep
from The Father (1992)
The Glass
His Stillness
The Lifting
The Race
Wonder
The Feelings
His Ashes
Beyond Harm
The Underlife
Natural History
The Ferryer
I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died
Waste Sonata
My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead
from The Wellspring (1996)
Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942
Killing My Sister’s Fish
Mrs. Krikorian
First
Adolescence
May 1968
Bathing the New Born
41, Alone, No Gerbil
Physics
My Son the Man
First Formal
High School Senior
The Pediatrician Retires
This Hour
Full Summer
Am and Am Not
True Love
from Blood, Tin, Straw (1999)
The Promise
Know-Nothing
Dear Heart,
19
That Day
After Punishment Was Done with Me
What Is the Earth?
Leaving the Island
The Prepositions
1954
Cool Breeze
For and Against Knowledge
The Spouses Waking Up in the Hotel Mirror
You Kindly
Where Will Love Go?
The Protestor
The Summer-Camp Bus Pulls Away from the Curb
The Talkers
First Thanksgiving
The Native
The Knowing
from The Unswept Room (2002)
Kindergarten Abecedarian
Bible Study: 71 B.C.E.
5¢ a Peek
Grey Girl
Still Life in Landscape
The Wedding Vow
His Costume
First Weeks
The Clasp
Diaphragm Aria
The Window
Fish Oil
Wonder as Wander
The Shyness
April, New Hampshire
The Untangling
The Learner
Heaven to Be
The Tending
Psalm
The Unswept
A Note About the Author
from Satan Says
Indictment of Senior Officers
In the hallway above the pit of the stairwell
my sister and I would meet, at night,
eyes and hair dark, bodies
like twins in the dark. We did not talk of
the two who had brought us there, like generals,
for their own reasons. We sat, buddies in cold
war, her living body the proof of
my living body, our backs to the mild
shell hole of the stairs, down which
we would have to go, knowing nothing
but what we had learned there,
so that now
when I think of my sister, the holes of the needles
in her hips and in the creases of her elbows,
and the marks from the doctor husband’s beatings,
and the scars of the operations, I feel the
rage of a soldier standing over the body of
someone sent to the front lines
without training
or a weapon.
The Sisters of Sexual Treasure
As soon as my sister and I got out of our
mother’s house, all we wanted to
do was fuck, obliterate
her tiny sparrow body and narrow
grasshopper legs. The men’s bodies
were like our father’s body! The massive
hocks, flanks, thighs, male
structure of the hips, knees, calves—
we could have him there, the steep forbidden
buttocks, backs of the knees, the cock
in our mouth, ah the cock in our mouth.
Like explorers who
discover a lost city, we went
nuts with joy, undressed the men
slowly and carefully, as if
uncovering buried artifacts that
that if Mother said it wasn’t there,
it was there.
Station
Coming in off the dock after writing,
I approached the house,
and saw your fine grandee face
lit by a lamp with a parchment shade
the color of flame.
An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered
eyes found me on the lawn. You looked
as the lord looks down from a narrow window
and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no
hint of shyness, you examined me,
the wife who runs out on the dock to write
as soon as one of the children is in bed,
leaving the other to you.
Your thin
mouth, flexible as an archer’s bow,
did not curve. We spent a long moment
in the truth of our situation, the poems
heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.
Monarchs
(for P. W.)
All morning, as I sit, thinking of you,
the Monarchs are passing. Seven stories up,
to the left of the river, they are making their way
south, their wings the dry red of
your hands like butchers’ hands, the raised
veins of their wings like your scars.
I could scarcely feel your massive rough
palms on me, your touch was so light,
the chapped scrape of an insect’s leg
across my breast. No one had ever
touched me before. I didn’t know enough to
open my legs, but felt your thighs,
feathered with red, gold hairs,
opening
between my legs
like a pair of wings.
The hinged print of my blood on your thighs—
a winged creature, pinned there—
and then you left, as you were to leave
over and over, the butterflies moving
in masses past my window, floating
south to their transformation, crossing over
borders in the night, the diffuse blood-red
cloud of them, my body under yours,
the beauty and silence of the great migrations.
Infinite Bliss
When I first saw snow cover the air
with its delicate hoofprints, I said I would never
live where it did not snow, and when
the first man tore his way into me,
and tore up the passageway,
and came to the small room, and pulled the
curtain aside that I might enter, I knew I could
never live apart from them
again, the strange race with their massive
bloodied hooves. Today we lay in our
small bedroom, dark gold with
reflected snow, and while the flakes climbed
delicately down the sky, you
came into me, pressing aside
the curtain, revealing the small room,
dark gold with reflected snow,
where we lay, and where you entered me and
pressed the curtain aside, revealing
the small room, dark gold with
reflected snow, where we lay.
The Language of the Brag
I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.
I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.
I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around
my belly big with cowardice and safety,
stool charcoal from the iron pills,
huge breasts leaking colostrum,
legs swelling, hands swelling,
face swelling and reddening, hair
falling out, inner sex
stabbed again and again with pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and shit and water and
slowly alone in the center of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.
The Talk
In the sunless wooden room at noon
the mother had a talk with her daughter.
The rudeness could not go on, the meanness
to her little brother, the selfishness.
The eight-year-old sat on the bed
in the corner of the room, her irises distilled as
the last drops of something, her firm
face melting, reddening,
silver flashes in her eyes like distant
bodies of water glimpsed through woods.
She took it and took it and broke, crying out
I hate being a person! diving
into the mother
as if
into
a deep pond—and she cannot swim,
the child cannot swim.
I Could Not Tell
I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,
because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
when I had one foot in the air.
I would not remember the tightening of my jaw,
the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out
into the air, the clear child
gazing about her in the air as I plunged
to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it,
the bus skidding to a stop, the driver
jumping out, my daughter laughing
Do it again.
I have never done it
again. I have been very careful.
I have kept an eye on that nice young mother
who lightly leapt
off the moving vehicle
onto the stopped street, her life
in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.
from The Dead and the Living
Ideographs
(a photograph of China, 1905)
The handmade scaffolds, boards in the form of
ideographs the size of a person
lean against a steep wall
of dressed stone. One is the simple
shape of a man. The man on it
is asleep, his arms nailed to the wood.
No timber is wasted; his fingertips
curl in at the very end of the plank
as a child’s hand opens in sleep.
The other man is awake—he looks
directly at us. He is fixed to a more
complex scaffold, a diagonal crosspiece
pointing one arm up, one down,
and his legs are bent, the spikes through his ankles
holding them up, off the ground,
his knees cocked, the folds of his robe flowing
sideways as if he were suspended in the air
in flight, his naked legs bared.
They await execution, tilted to the wall
as you’d prop up a tool until you needed it.
They’ll be shouldered up over the crowd and
carried through the screaming. The sleeper will wake.
The twisted one will fly above the faces, his
garment rippling.
Here there is still the backstage quiet,
the shadow at the bottom of the wall, the props
leaning in the grainy half-dusk.
He looks at us in the silence. He says
Save me, there is still time.
Photograph of the Girl
The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw, hot wind blowing
sand in her face. Hunger and puberty
are taking her together. She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous. The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others. Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.
Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921
The blazing white shirts of the white men
are blanks on the page, looking at them is like
looking at the sun, you could go blind.
Under the snouts of the machine guns,
the dark glowing skin of the women and
men going to jail. You can look at the
gleaming horse chestnuts of their faces the whole day.