begins to snap, glossy and elastic as the
torso bending over it,
this ten-year-old girl, random specks of
yeast in her flesh beginning to heat,
her volume doubling every month now, but still
raw and hard. She slaps the dough and it
crackles under her palm, sleek and
ferocious and still leashed, like her body, no
breasts rising like bubbles of air toward the
surface of the loaf. She greases the pan, she is
shaped, glazed, and at any moment goes
into the oven, to turn to that porous
warm substance, and then under the
knife to be sliced for the having, the tasting, and the
giving of life.
Bestiary
Nostrils flared, ears pricked,
our son asks me if people can mate with
animals. I say it hardly
ever happens. He frowns, fur and
skin and hooves and slits and pricks and
teeth and tails whirling in his brain.
world to be closed to him in any
form. We talk about elephants
and parakeets, until we are rolling on the
floor, laughing like hyenas. Too late,
I remember love—I backtrack
and try to slip it in, but that is
not what he means. Seven years old,
he is into hydraulics, pulleys, doors which
fly open in the side of the body,
entrances, exits. Flushed, panting,
hot for physics, he thinks about lynxes,
eagles, pythons, mosquitos, girls,
casting a glittering eye of use
over creation, wanting to know
exactly how the world was made to receive him.
The One Girl at the Boys’ Party
When I take our girl to the swimming party
I set her down among the boys. They tower and
bristle, she stands there smooth and sleek,
her math scores unfolding in the air around her.
They will strip to their suits, her body hard and
they’ll plunge in the deep end, she’ll subtract
her height from ten feet, divide it into
hundreds of gallons of water, the numbers
bouncing in her mind like molecules of chlorine
in the bright blue pool. When they climb out,
her ponytail will hang its pencil lead
down her back, her narrow silk suit
with hamburgers and french fries printed on it
will glisten in the brilliant air, and they will
see her sweet face, solemn and
sealed, a factor of one, and she will
see their eyes, two each,
their legs, two each, and the curves of their sexes,
one each, and in her head she’ll be doing her
wild multiplying, as the drops
sparkle and fall to the power of a thousand from her body.
The Couple
On the way to the country, they fall asleep
in the back seat, those enemies,
rulers of separate countries, sister and
brother. Her big hard head
until they are crown to crown, brown
hair mingling like velvet. Mouths
open, the rosebud and her cupid’s bow,
they dream against each other, her calm
almond eyes and his round blue eyes
closed, quivering like trout. Their toes
touching opposite doors, their hands in
loose fists, their heads together in
unconsciousness, they look like a small
royal bride and groom, the bride still a
head taller, married as children
in the Middle Ages, for purposes of state,
fighting all day, and finding their only
union in sleep, in the dark solitary
power of the dream—the dream of ruling the world.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and The Nation. Her first book of poems, Satan Says, was published in 1980 and received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award. She lives in New York City. She was recently awarded the Walt Whitman Citation for Merit by the New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York.