Sharon Olds

 

Topography

After we flew across the country wegot in bed, laid our bodiesdelicately together, like maps laidface to face, East to West, mySan Francisco against your New York, yourFire Island against my Sonoma, my New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idahobright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas burning against your Kansas your Kansasburning against my Kansas, your EasternStandard Time pressing into my Pacific Time, my Mountain Timebeating against your Central Time, your sun rising swiftly from the right my sun rising swiftly from the left your moon rising slowly from the left my moon rising slowly from the right until all four bodies of the skyburn above us, sealing us together, all our cities twin cities, all our states united, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The Race

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk, bought a ticket, ten minutes later they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors had said my father would not live through the night and the flight was cancelled. A young man with a dark brown moustache told me another airline had a nonstop leaving in seven minutes. See that elevator over there, well go down to the first floor, make a right, you'll see a yellow bus, get off at the

second Pan Am terminal, I ran, I who have no sense of direction raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish slipping upstream deftly against the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those bags I had thrown everything into in five minutes, and ran, the bags wagged me from side to side as if to prove I was under the claims of the material, I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast, I who always go to the end of the line, I said Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then run. I lumbered up the moving stairs, at the top I saw the corridor, and then I took a deep breath, I said goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort, I used my legs and heart as if I would gladly use them up for this, to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of women running, their belongings tied in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my long legs he gave me, my strong heart I abandoned to its own purpose, I ran to Gate 17 and they were just lifting the thick white lozenge of the door to fit it into the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not too rich, I turned sideways and slipped through the needle's eye, and then I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet was full, and people's hair was shining, they were smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a mist of gold endorphin light, I wept as people weep when they enter heaven, in massive relief. We lifted up gently from one tip of the continent and did not stop until we set down lightly on the other edge, I walked into his room and watched his chest rise slowly and sink again, all night I watched him breathe.

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Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make lovewithout love? Beautiful as dancers,gliding over each other like ice-skatersover the ice, fingers hookedinside each other's bodies, facesred as steak, wine, wet as thechildren at birth whose mothers are going togive them away. How do they come to thecome to the come to the God come to thestill waters, and not lovethe one who came there with them, lightrising slowly as steam off their joinedskin? These are the true religious,the purists, the pros, the ones who will notaccept a false Messiah, love thepriest instead of the God. They do notmistake the lover for their own pleasure,they are like great runners: they know they are alonewith the road surface, the cold, the wind,the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-vascular health--just factors, like the partnerin the bed, and not the truth, which is thesingle body alone in the universeagainst its own best time.

 

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges, I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood behind his head, I see my mother with a few light books at her hip standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its sword-tips black in the May air,they are about to graduate, they are about to get married, they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they areinnocent, they would never hurt anybody.I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it—she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do things

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you cannot imagine you would ever do, you are going to do bad things to children,you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of, you are going to want to die. I want to go up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,her pitiful beautiful untouched body, his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,his pitiful beautiful untouched body,but I don't do it. I want to live. I take them up like the male and female paper dolls and bang them together at the hips like chips of flint as if to strike sparks from them, I sayDo what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

 

What is the Earth?

The earth is a homeless person. Orthe earth's home is the atmosphere.Or the atmosphere is the earth's clothing,layers of it, the earth wears all of it,the earth is a homeless person.Or the atmosphere is the earth's cocoon,which it spun itself, the earth is a larvum.Or the atmosphere is the earth's skin—earth, and atmostphere, onehomeless one. Or its orbit is the earth'shome, or the path of the orbit justa path, the earth, a homeless person.Or the gutter of the earth's orbit is a circleof hell, the circle of the homeless. But the earthhas a place, around the fire, the hearthof our star, the earth is at home, the earthis home to the homeless. For food, and warmth,and shelter, and health, they have earth and fireand air and water, for home they havethe elements they are made of, as ifeach homeless one were an earth, madeof milk and grain, like Ceres, and onecould eat oneself—as if the humanwere a god, who could eat the earth, a godof homelessness.

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The Connoisseuse of Slugs

When I was a connoisseuse of slugsI would part the ivy leaves, and look for thenaked jelly of those gold bodies,translucent strangers glistening along thestones, slowly, their gelatinous bodiesat my mercy. Made mostly of water, they would shrivelto nothing if they were sprinkled with salt,but I was not interested in that. What I likedwas to draw aside the ivy, breathe theodor of the wall, and stand there in silenceuntil the slug forgot I was thereand sent its antennae up out of itshead, the glimmering umber hornsrising like telescopes, until finally thesensitive knobs would pop out theends, delicate and intimate. Years later,when I first saw a naked man,I gasped with pleasure to see that quietmystery reenacted, the slowelegant being coming out of hiding andgleaming in the dark air, eager and sotrusting you could weep.

 

High School Senior

For seventeen years, her breath in the house at night, puff, puff, like summer cumulus above her bed, and her scalp smelling of apricots—this being who had formed within me, squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark, like an eohippus she had come out of history slowly, through me, into the daylight, I had the daily sight of her, like food or air she was there, like a mother. I say "college," but I feel as if I cannot tellthe difference between her leaving for college and our parting forever—I try to seethis house without her, without her pure depth of feeling, without her creek-brown

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hair, her daedal hands with their tapered fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak'swing, but I can't. Seventeen yearsago, in this room, she moved inside me,I looked at the river, I could not imagine my life with her. I gazed across the street, and saw, in the icy winter sun,a column of steam rush up away from the earth. There are creatures whose children float away at birth, and those who throat-feed their youngfor weeks and never see them again. My daughter is free and she is in me—no, my love of her is in me, moving in my heart, changing chambers, like something poured from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.

 

Take the I Out

But I love the I, steel I-beam that my father sold. They poured the pig iron into the mold, and it fed out slowly, a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened, Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream of Wheat, its curl of butter right in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning and sour in the evening. I love the I, frail between its flitches, its hard ground and hard sky, it soars between them like the soul that rushes, back and forth, between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other, how would it have felt to be the strut joining the floor and roof of the truss? I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled slope of her temperature rising, and on the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach the crest, the Roman numeral I—I, I, I, I, girders of identity, head on, embedded in the poem. I love the I for its premise of existence—our I—when I was born, part gelid, I lay with you

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on the cooling table, we were all there, a forest of felled iron. The I is a pine, resinous, flammable root to crown, which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.

 

1954

Then dirt scared me, because of the dirthe had put on her face. And her training brascared me—the newspapers, morning and evening,kept saying it, training bra,as if the cups of it had been callingthe breasts up—he buried her in it,perhaps he had never bothered to take itoff. They found her underpantsin a garbage can. And I feared the wordeczema, like my acne and likethe X in the paper which marked her body,as if he had killed her for not being flawless.I feared his name, Burton Abbott,the first name that was a last name,as if he were not someone specific.It was nothing one could learn from his face.His face was dull and ordinary,it took away what I’d thought I could count onabout evil. He looked thin and lonely,it was horrifying, he looked almost humble.I felt awe that dirt was so impersonal,and pity for the training bra,pity and terror of eczema.And I could not sit on my mother’s electricblanket anymore, I began to have a fear of electricity—the good people, the parents, were going tofry him to death. This was whathis parents had been telling us:Burton Abbott, Burton Abbott,death to the person, death to the home planet.The worst thing was to think of her,of what it had been to be her, alive,to be walked, alive, into that cabin,to look into those eyes, and see the human

 

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Crab

When I eat crab, slide the rosyrubbery claw across my tongueI think of my mother. She'd drive downto the edge of the Bay, tiny woman in ahuge car, she'd ask the crab-man tocrack it for her. She'd stand and wait as thepliers broke those chalky homes, wild-red and knobby, those cartilage wrists, thethin orange roof of the back.I'd come home, and find her at the tablecrisply unhousing the parts, laying thefierce shell on one side, thesoft body on the other. She gave uslots, because we loved it so much,so there was always enough, a mound of crab like across between breast-milk and meat. The backeven had the shape of a perfectruined breast, upright flakeswhite as the flesh of a chrysanthemum, but thebest part was the claw, she'd slide itout so slowly the tip was unbroken,scarlet bulb of the feeler—it was such akick to easily eat that weapon,wreck its delicate hooked pulp betweenpalate and tongue. She loved to feed usand all she gave us was fresh, she was willing tograsp shell, membrane, stem, to goclose to dirt and salt to feed us,the way she had gone near our father himselfto give us life. I look back andsee us dripping at the table, feeding, herrow of pink eaters, the platter of flawlesslimp claws, I look back further andsee her in the kitchen, shelling flesh, hersmall hands curled—she is like afish-hawk, wild, tearing the meatdeftly, living out her life of fear and desire.

 

May 1968

When the Dean said we could not cross campusuntil the students gave up the buildings,

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we lay down, in the street,we said the cops will enter this gateover us. Lying back on the cobbles,I saw the buildings of New York Cityfrom dirt level, they soared upand stopped, chopped off--above them, the sky,the night air over the island.The mounted police moved, near us,while we sang, and then I began to count,12, 13, 14, 15,I counted again, 15, 16, onemonth since the day on that deserted beach,17, 18, my mouth fell open,my hair on the street,if my period did not come tonightI was pregnant. I could see the sole of a cop'sshoe, the gelding's belly, its genitals--if they took me to Women's Detention and didthe exam on me, the speculum,the fingers--I gazed into the horse's taillike a comet-train. All week, I hadthought about getting arrested, half-longedto give myself away. On the tar--one brain in my head, another,in the making, near the base of my tail--I looked at the steel arc of the horse'sshoe, the curve of its belly, the cop'snightstick, the buildings streaming upaway from the earth. I knew I should get upand leave, but I lay there looking at the spaceabove us, until it turned deep blue and thenashy, colorless, Give me this onenight, I thought, and I'll give this childthe rest of my life, the horse's heads,this time, drooping, dipping, untilthey slept in a circle around my body and my daughter

 

One Year

When I got to his marker, I sat on it,like sitting on the edge of someone's bed and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite.I took some tears from my jaw and neckand started to wash a corner of his stone.

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Then a black and amber antran out onto the granite, and off it,and another ant hauled a deadant onto the stone, leaving it, and not coming back.Ants ran down into the grooves of his nameand dates, down into the oval track of the first name's O, middle name's O,the short O of his last name,and down into the hyphen betweenhis birth and death--little trough of his life.Soft bugs appeared on my shoes,like grains of pollen, I let them move on me,I rinsed a dark fleck of mica,and down inside the engraved lettersthe first dots of lichen were appearinglike stars in early evening.I saw the speedwell on the ground with its horns,the coiled ferns, copper-beech blossoms, eachpetal like that disc of matter whichswayed, on the last day, on his tongue.Tamarack, Western hemlock,manzanita, water birchwith its scored bark,I put my arms around a trunk and squeezed it,then I lay down on my father's grave.The sun shone down on me, the powerfulants walked on me. When I woke,my cheek was crumbly, yellowish with a mustard plaster of earth. Onlyat the last minute did I think of his bodyactually under me, the can of bone, ash, soft as a goosedownpillow that bursts in bed with the lovers.When I kissed his stone it was not enough,when I licked it my tongue went dry a moment, I ate his dust, I tasted my dirt host.

 

Primitive

I have heard about the civilized, the marriages run on talk, elegant and honest, rational. But you and I are savages. You come in with a bag, hold it out to me in silence. I know Moo Shu Pork when I smell it

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and understand the message: I have pleased you greatly last night. We sit quietly, side by side, to eat, the long pancakes dangling and spilling, fragrant sauce dripping out, and glance at each other askance, wordless, the corners of our eyes clear as spear points laid along the sill to show a friend sits with a friend here.

 

The Victims

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it andtook it in silence, all those years and thenkicked you out, suddenly, and herkids loved it. Then you were fired, and wegrinned inside, the way people grinned whenNixon's helicopter lifted off the SouthLawn for the last time. We were tickledto think of your office taken away, your secretaries taken away, your lunches with three double bourbons, your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take yoursuits back, too, those darkcarcasses hung in your closet, and the blacknoses of your shoes with their large pores? She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take ituntil we pricked with her for your annihilation, Father. Now Ipass the bums in doorways, the whiteslugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in theirsuits of compressed silt, the stainedflippers of their hands, the underwaterfire of their eyes, ships gone down with thelanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and took it from them in silence until they hadgiven it all away and had nothing left but this.

 

The Pope's Penis

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It hangs deep in his robes, a delicateclapper at the center of a bell.It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in ahalo of silver sweaweed, the hairswaying in the dark and the heat -- and at nightwhile his eyes sleep, it stands upin praise of God.

 

The Space Heater

On the then-below-zero day, it was on,near the patients' chair, the old heaterkept by the analyst's couch, at the end,like the infant's headstone that was added near the footof my father's grave. And it was hot, with the almostlaughing satire of a fire's heat,the little coils like hairs in Hell.And it was making a group of sick noises-I wanted the doctor to turn it offbut I couldn't seem to ask, so I juststared, but it did not budge. The doctorturned his heavy, soft palmoutward, toward me, inviting me to speak, Isaid, "If you're cold-are you cold? But if it's on for me..." He held his palm out toward me,I tried to ask, but I only muttered,but he said, "Of course," as if I had asked,and he stood up and approached the heater, and thenstood on one foot, and threw himselftoward the wall with one hand, and with the other handreached down, behind the couch, to pullthe plug out. I looked away,I had not known he would have to bendlike that. And I was so moved, that hewould act undignified, to help me,that I cried, not trying to stop, but as ifthe moans made sentences which boresome human message. If he would cast himself toward theoutlet for me, as if bending with me in my oldshame and horror, then I would reston his art-and the heater purred, like a creatureor the familiar of a creature, or the child of a familiar,the father of a child, the spirit of a father,the healing of a spirit, the vision of healing,

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the heat of vision, the power of heat,the pleasure of power.

The Slash

The first ones were attached to my dressat the waist, one on either side,right at the point where hands could clasp you andpick you up, as if you were a hotsqueeze bottle of tree syrup, and thesashes that emerged like axil buds from theangles of the waist were used to play horses, thatracing across the cement while someoneheld your reins and you could feel your fleshitself in your body wildly streaming.You would come home, a torn-off sashdangling from either hand, a snake-charmer—each time, she sewed them back on withthicker thread, until the seams ofsash and dress bulged like littleknots of gristle at your waist as you walked, you couldfeel them like thumbs pressing into your body.The next sash was the one Thee, Hannah!borrowed from her be-ribboned friendand hid in a drawer and got salve on it,salve on a sash, like bacon grease on a snake,God's lard on the ribbon a Quaker girlshould not want, Satan's jism onsilk delicate as the skin of a young girl's genital.When Hannah gave up satin her fathertold her she was beautifuljust as God made her. But all sasheslead to the sash, very sash ofvery sash, begotten, not made, that myaunt sent from Switzerland—cobalt ripple of Swiss cotton withclean boys and girls dancing on it.I don't know why my mother chose it totie me to the chair with, her eye justfell on it, but the whole day Ifelt those blue children dancearound my wrists. Later someonetold me they had found outthe universe is a kind of strip that

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twists around and joins itself, and I believe it,sometimes I can feel it, the way we arepouring slowly toward a curve and around itthrough something dark and soft, and we are bound toeach other.

The Mortal One

Three months after he lies dead, thatlong yellow narrow body,not like Christ but like one of his saints,the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies aredone in gilt, all knees and raw ribs,the ones who died of nettles, bile, theone who died roasted over a slow fire—three months later I take the pot oftulip bulbs out of the closetand set it on the table and take off the foil hood.The shoots stand up like young green pencils,and there in the room is the comfortable smell of rot,the bulb that did not make it, marked withridges like an elephant's notched foot,I walk down the hall as if I were moving through thelong stem of the tulip toward the closed sheath.In the kitchen I throw a palmful of peppercorns into thesaucepanas if I would grow a black tree from the soup,I throw out the rotten chicken part,glad again that we burned my fatherbefore one single bloom of mold couldgrow upout of him,maybe it had begun in his bowels but we burned hisbowelsthe way you burn the long bluescarf of the dead, and all their clothing,cleansing with fire. How fast time goesnow that I'm happy, now that I know how tothink of his dead body every daywithout shock, almost without grief,to take it into each part of the day theway a loom parts the vertical threads,half to the left half to the right like the Red Sea and youthrow the shuttle through with the warp-threadattached to the feet, that small gold figure of my father—

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how often I saw him in paintings and did not know him,the tiny naked dead one in the corner,the mortal one.

 

The Daughter Goes to Camp

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,I could not believe you were gone. My palm keptcreeping over the smooth plasticto find your strong meaty little hand andsqueeze it, find your narrow thigh in thenoble ribbing of the corduroy,straight and regular as anything in nature, tofind the slack cool cheek of achild in the heat of a summer morning—nothing, nothing, waves of bawlinghitting me in hot flashes like somechange of life, some boiling waverising in me toward your body, towardwhere it should have been on the seat, yourbrow curved like a cereal bowl, youreyes dark with massed crystals like themagnified scales of a butterfly's wing, thedelicate feelers of your limp hair,floods of blood rising in my face as Itried to reassemble the hotgritty molecules in the car, tomake you appear like a holographon the back seat, pull you out of nothingas I once did—but you were really gone,the cab glossy as a slit caul out ofwhich you had slipped, the air glitteringelectric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.

The Arrivals

I pull the bed slowly open, Iopen the lips of the bed, getthe stack of fresh underpantsout of the suitcase—peach, white,cherry, quince, pussy willow, Ichoose a color and put them on,

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I travel with the stack for the stack's caress,dry and soft. I enter the softbirth-lips of the bed, take off myglasses, and the cabbage-roses on the curtainblur to Keats's peonies, theochre willow holds a cloudthe way a skeleton holds fleshand it passes, does not hold it.The bed fits me like a walnut shell itsmeat, my hands touch the upper corners,the lower, my feet. It is so silentI hear the choirs of wild silence, themaenads of the atoms. Is this what it feels liketo have a mother? The sheets are heavycream, whipped. Ah, here is my mother,or rather here she is not, so this isparadise. But surely thatwas paradise, when her Jell-O nipple was thesize of my own fist, in front of myface—out of its humped runkles thoseseveral springs of milk, so fiercealmost fearsome. What did I thinkin that brain gridded for thought, its cupsloaded with languageless rennet? And at night,when they timed me, four hours of screaming, not aminute more, four, those quatrains oficy yell, then the cold tap waterto get me over my shameless hunger,what was it like to be there when thathunger was driven into my structure at suchheat it alloyed that iron? Where have Ibeen while this person is leading my lifewith her patience, will and order? In the garden;on the bee and under the bee; in thecrown gathering cumulus andflensing it from the boughs, weeping arehearsal for the rotting and casting off of ourflesh, the year we slowly throw itoff like clothing by the bed covers of our lover, and dive under.

 

The Borders

To say that she came into me,from another world, is not true.

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Nothing comes into the universeand nothing leaves it.My mother—I mean my daughter did notenter me. She began to existinside me—she appeared within me.And my mother did not enter me.When she lay down, to pray, on me,she was always ferociously courteous,fastidious with Puritan fastidiousness,but the barrier of my skin failed, the barrier of mybody fell, the barrier of my spirit.She aroused and magnetized my skin, I wantedardently to please her, I would say to herwhat she wanted to hear, as if I were hers.I served her willingly, and thenbecame very much like her, fiercelyout for myself.When my daughter was in me, I felt I hada soul in me. But it was born with her.But when she cried, one night, such pure crying,I said I will take care of you, I willput you first. I will not everhave a daughter the way she had me,I will not ever swim in youthe way my mother swam in me and Ifelt myself swum in. I will never know anyoneagain the way I knew my mother,the gates of the human fallen.

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 hisface, again, and when I had her wristin my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a coupleof seconds, to make an impression on her,to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almostsavored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,the expression, into her, of my anger,"Never, never, again," the righteouschant accompanying the clasp. It happened veryfast-grab, crush, crush,crush, release-and at the first extraforce, she swung her head, as if checking

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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 mein, she knew me, in the shock of the momentshe learned me. This was her mother, one of thetwo whom she most loved, the twowho loved her most, near the source of love was this.

 

The End

We decided to have the abortion, becamekillers together. The period that camechanged nothing. They were dead, that young couplewho had been for life.As we talked of it in bed, the crashwas not a surprise. We went to the window,looked at the crushed cars and the gleamingcurved shears of glass as if we haddone it. Cops pulled the bodies outBloody as births from the small, smokingaperture of the door, laid themon the hill, covered them with blankets that soakedthrough. Bloodbegan to pourdown my legs into my slippers. I stoodwhere I was until they shot the boundform into the black holeof the ambulance and stood the other oneup, a bandage covering its head,stained where the eyes had been.The next morning I had to kneelan hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,rubbing with wet cloths at those glitteringtranslucent spots, as one has to soaka long time to deglaze the panwhen the feast is over.

 

The Pact

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We played dolls in that house where Father staggered with theThanksgiving knife, where Mother wept at noon into her one ounce ofcottage cheese, praying for the strength not tokill herself. We kneeled over therubber bodies, gave them bathscarefully, scrubbed their littleorange hands, wrapped them up tight,said goodnight, never spoke of thewoman like a gaping woundweeping on the stairs, the man like a stuckbuffalo, baffled, stunned, draggingarrows in his side. As if we had made apact of silence and safety, we kneeled anddressed those tiny torsos with their elegantbelly-buttons and minuscule holeshigh on the buttock to pee through and all thatdarkness in their open mouths, so that Ihave not been able to forgive you for giving yourdaughter away, letting her go ateight as if you took Molly Ann orTiny Tears and held her headunder the water in the bathinetteuntil no bubbles rose, or threw herdark rosy body on the fire thatburned in that house where you and Ibarely survived, sister, where weswore to be protectors. 

A Week Later

A week later, I said to a friend: I don'tthink I could ever write about it.Maybe in a year I could write something.There is something in me maybe somedayto be written; now it is folded, and folded,and folded, like a note in school. And in my dreamsomeone was playing jacks, and in the air there was ahuge, thrown, tilted jackon fire. And when I woke up, I found myselfcounting the days since I had last seenmy husband--only two years, and some weeks,and hours. We had signed the papers and come down to theground floor of the Chrysler Building,the intact beauty of its lobby around uslike a king's tomb, on the ceiling the little

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painted plane, in the mural, flying. And itentered my strictured heart, this morning,slightly, shyly as if warily,untamed, a greater sense of the sweetnessand plenty of his ongoing life,unknown to me, unseen by me,unheard, untouched-but known, seen,heard, touched. And it came to me,for moments at a time, moment after moment,to be glad for him that he is with the onehe feels was meant for him. And I thought of mymother, minutes from her death, eighty-fiveyears from her birth, the almost warblerbones of her shoulder under my hand, theeggshell skull, as she lay in some peacein the clean sheets, and I could tell her the bestof my poor, partial love, I could sing herout with it, I saw the luckand luxury of that hour.

Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942

Everything has been taken that anyonethought worth taking. The stairs are tilted,scattered with sycamore leaves curledlike ammonites in inland rock.Wood shows through the paint on the frameand the door is open--an empty room,sunlight on the floor. All that is lefton the porch is the hollow cylinderof an Albert's Quick Oats cardboard boxand a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrialhead is bowed, its scrolled neckglistens. I was born, that day, near there,in wartime, of ignorant people.

 

Your's, Kindly

Because I felt too weak to moveyou kindly moved for me, kneelingand turning, until you could take my breast-tip in thesocket of your lips; and my womb went down

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on itself, drew sharply over and overto its tightest shape, the way, when newbornsnurse, the fist of the uteruswith each, milk, tug, powerfullyshuts. I saw your hand, near me, yourdaily hand, your thumbnail,the quiet ordinary self, when your mouth at mybreast was drawing sweet gashes of comeup from my womb made black fork-flashes of a celibate's lust shoot through me. And I couldn'tlift my head, and you swiveled, and came downclose to me, delicate blunttouch of your hard penis in long caresses down my face, specieshappiness, calm which gleamswith fearless anguished desire. It foundmy pouring mouth, the back of my throat,and the bright wall which opens. It seemed totake us hours to move the bonecreatures so their gods could be fitted to each other,and then, at last, home, rootin the earth, wing in the air. As it finished,it seemed my sex was a grey flowerthe color of the brain, smooth and glistening,a complex calla or iris which you were creating with the errless digitof your sex. But then, as it finished again,one could not speak of a blossom, or the blossom was stripped away, as if, untilthat moment, the cunt had been clothed, still,in the thinnest garment, and now was bareor more than bare, silver wet-suit of matter itself gone, nothingthere but the paradise flay. And thenmore, that cannot be told — may be,but cannot be, things that did nothave to do with me, as if some wires crossed, and historyor war, or the witches possessed, or the endof life were happening in me, or as if I were in a borrowed body, Iknew what I could not know, did — wasdone to — what I cannot-do-be-done-to, so when we returned, I cried, afraid for a momentI was dead, and had got my wish to come back,once, and sleep with you, on a summer

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afternoon, in an empty housewhere no one could hear us.I lowered the salt breasts of my eyesto your lips, and you sucked,then I looked at your face, at its absence of unkindness,its giving that absence off as a matterI cannot name, as if I was seeing notyou but something between us, that can liveonly between us. I stroked back the hair inpond and sex rivuletsfrom your forehead, gently raked it backalong your scalp,I did not think of my father's hairin death, those oiled paths, I layalong your length and did not think how hedid not love me, how he trained me not to be loved.

 

 

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