Sharon Olds Anthology

Sharon Olds’s books include Strike Sparks; Selected Poems 1980–2002; The
Unswept Room, a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book
Critics Circle Award; and The Dead and the Living, which was chosen as the
Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets and received the
National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative
Writing Program at New York University, and for eighteen years has helped
run a writing workshop at the Sigismund Goldwater Memorial Hospital, a
state hospital for the severely physically challenged. From 1998–2000 she
was New York State Poet Laureate. She was named the James Merrill Fellow
Copyright © 2014. University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved.
of the Academy of American Poets for 2003, and was inducted into the
American Academy of Arts and Science in 2004. She lives in New York City.
257 4 sharon olds
American Poetry Now : Pitt Poetry Series Anthology, edited by Ed Ochester, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014. ProQuest
Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/univalencia/detail.action?docID=2039386.
Created from univalencia on 2017-12-15 11:56:15.
Satan Says
I am locked in a little cedar box

with a picture of shepherds pasted onto
the central panel between carvings.
The box stands on curved legs.
It has a gold, heart-shaped lock
and no key. I am trying to write my
way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan
comes to me in the locked box
and says, I’ll get you out. Say
My father is a shit. I say
my father is a shit and Satan
laughs and says, It’s opening.
Say your mother is a pimp.
My mother is a pimp. Something
opens and breaks when I say that.
My spine uncurls in the cedar box
like the pink back of the ballerina pin
with a ruby eye, resting beside me on
satin in the cedar box.
Say shit, say death, say fuck the father,
Satan says, down my ear.
The pain of the locked past buzzes
in the child’s box on her bureau, under
the terrible round pond eye

etched around with roses, where
self-loathing gazed at sorrow.
Shit. Death. Fuck the father.
Something opens. Satan says
Don’t you feel a lot better?
Light seems to break on the delicate
edelweiss pin, carved in two
colors of wood. I love him too,
you know, I say to Satan dark
in the locked box. I love them but
I’m trying to say what happened to us
in the lost past. Of course, he says
258 4 sharon olds
and smiles, of course. Now say: torture.
I see, through blackness soaked in cedar,
the edge of a large hinge open.
Say: the father’s cock, the mother’s
cunt, says Satan, I’ll get you out.
The angle of the hinge widens
until I see the outlines of
the time before I was, when they were
locked in the bed. When I say
the magic words, Cock, Cunt,
Satan softly says, Come out.
But the air around the opening
is heavy and thick as hot smoke.
Come in, he says, and I feel his voice
breathing from the opening.
The exit is through Satan’s mouth.
Come in my mouth, he says, you’re there
already, and the huge hinge
begins to close. Oh no, I loved
them, too, I brace
my body tight
in the cedar house.
Satan sucks himself out the keyhole.
I’m left locked in the box, he seals
the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue.
It’s your coffin now, Satan says.
I hardly hear;
I am warming my cold
hands at the dancer’s
ruby eye—
the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.
Quake Theory
When two plates of earth scrape along each other

like a mother and daughter
it is called a fault.
259 4 sharon olds
There are faults that slip smoothly past each other
an inch a year, with just a faint rasp
like a man running his hand over his chin,
that man between us,
and there are faults that get stuck at a bend for twenty years.
The ridge bulges up like a father’s sarcastic forehead
and the whole thing freezes in place, the man between us.
When this happens, there will be heavy damage
to industrial areas and leisure residence
when the deep plates
finally jerk past
the terrible pressure of their contact.
The earth cracks
and innocent people slip gently in like swimmers.
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 wartime, her living body the proof of

my living body, our backs to the vast
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 latest husband’s beatings,
and the scars of the operations, I feel the
rage of a soldier standing over the body of
260 4 sharon olds
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, elegant
knees, long tapered 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
proved our theory of the lost culture:
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 long grandee face
in the light of 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
261 4 sharon olds
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 child is in bed,
leaving the other to you.
Your long
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.
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,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
Stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.
262 4 sharon olds
I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces 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.
Seventh Birthday of the First Child
The children were around my feet like dogs,

milling, nipping, wetting, slavering,
feed sieving from their chops like plankton.
I slid on their messes, I found their silky bodies
asleep in corners, paws fallen
north, south, east, west,
little sexes gleaming.

Ankle-deep in their smell, their noise,
their crisis, their noses cold and black
or going soft with fever, I waded, I slogged.
crowding around my toes like tits,
they taught me to walk carefully,
to hold still to be sucked.
I worked my feet in them like mud
for the pleasure.
And suddenly there is a head at my breastbone
as if one of the litter had climbed
263 4 sharon olds
onto the branch of a dwarf tree
which overnight grew to here
bearing you up, daughter, with your dark
newborn eyes. You sit in the boughs,
blossoms breaking like porcelain cups around you.
The Unjustly Punished Child
The child screams in his room. Rage

heats his head.
He is going through changes like metal under deep
pressure at high temperatures.
When he cools off and comes out of that door
he will not be the same child who ran in
and slammed it. An alloy has been added. Now he will
crack along different lines when tapped.
He is stronger. The long impurification
has begun this morning.
The Mother
In the dreamy silence after bath,

hot in the milk-white towel, my son
announces that I will not love him when I’m dead

because people can’t think when they’re dead. I can’t
think at first—not love him? The air outside the
window is very black, the old locust
beginning to lose its leaves already . . .
I hold him tight, he is white as a buoy
and my death like dark water is rising
swiftly in the room. I tell him I loved him
before he was born. I do not tell him
I’m damned if I won’t love him after I’m
dead, necessity after all being
the mother of invention.
264 4 sharon olds

Sharon Olds Anthology

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Sharon Olds’s books include Strike Sparks; Selected Poems 1980–2002; The

257 4 sharon olds

I am locked in a little cedar box

the terrible round pond eye

258 4 sharon olds

When two plates of earth scrape along each other

259 4 sharon olds

Indictment of Senior Officers

In the hallway above the pit of the stairwell

in wartime, her living body the proof of

260 4 sharon olds

The Sisters of Sexual Treasure

As soon as my sister and I got out of our

Coming in off the dock after writing,

261 4 sharon olds

The Language of the Brag

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,

magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot

262 4 sharon olds

Seventh Birthday of the First Child

The children were around my feet like dogs,

little sexes gleaming.

263 4 sharon olds

The Unjustly Punished Child

The child screams in his room. Rage

In the dreamy silence after bath,

announces that I will not love him when I’m dead

264 4 sharon olds

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