Also by Sharon Olds
SATAN SAYS
THE GOLD CELL
THE FATHER
THE WELLSPRING
BLOOD, TIN, STRAW
THE UNSWEPT ROOM
STRIKE SPARKS
The Dead and the Living is the 1983
Lamont Poetry Selection of the
Academy of American Poets.
From 1954 through 1974 the Lamont
Poetry Selection supported the
publication and distribution of
twenty first books of poems. Since
1975 this distinguished award has
been given for an American poet’s
second book.
Judges for 1983: June Jordan,
Charles Simic, and David Wagoner
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright © 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 by Sharon Olds
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.
www.randomhouse.com/knopf/poetry
Most of the poems in this collection have appeared in the following publications: Alcatraz, The Atlantic, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Contact/II, Iowa Review, Kayak, The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, The New Republic, New York Quarterly Review, Open Places, Ploughshares, The Poetry Miscellany, Poetry Northwest, Poets On, Prairie Schooner, A Shout in the Street, Tar River Poetry, The Yale Review.
“Photograph of the Girl” originally appeared in The Missouri Review. “Things That Are Worse Than Death” and “The Eye” originally appeared in The Nation. Copyright 1982 Nation Magazine, The Nation Associates, Inc. “The Winter After Your Death” originally appeared in The New Yorker. “Ideographs,” “The Guild,” “The Fear of Oneself,” “Armor” and “Burn Center” were first published in Poetry. “Pre-Adolescent in Spring” was first published in The Seattle Review.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Olds, Sharon. The dead and the living.
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3565.L34D4 1983 811’.54 83–47780
eISBN: 978-0-307-76054-8
I wish to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts for their generous support during the completion of this book.
v3.1
For George and Mary Oppen
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Part One: Poems for the Dead I. PUBLIC Ideographs
Photograph of the Girl
Race Riot, Tulsa, 1921
Portrait of a Child
Nevsky Prospekt
The Death of Marilyn Monroe
The Issues
Aesthetics of the Shah
Things That Are Worse Than Death
II. PRIVATE The Guild
Grandmother Love Poem
The Eye
Birthday Poem for My Grandmother
Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This Once
Farewell Poem
The Winter After Your Death
Miscarriage
The End
Best Friends
Absent One
Part Two: Poems for the Living
I. THE FAMILY
Possessed
The Victims
The Forms
The Departure
Burn Center
The Ideal Father
Fate
My Father Snoring
The Moment
My Father’s Breasts
The Takers
The Pact
The Derelict
Late Speech with My Brother
The Elder Sister
II. THE MEN The Connoisseuse of Slugs
Poem to My First Lover
New Mother
The Line
The Fear of Oneself
Poem to My Husband from My Father’s Daughter
Sex Without Love
Ecstasy
III. THE CHILDREN Exclusive
Six-Year-Old Boy
Eggs
Size and Sheer Will
For My Daughter
Rite of Passage
Relinquishment
Son
Pre-Adolescent in Spring
Blue Son
Pajamas
The Killer
The Sign of Saturn
Armor
35/10
The Missing Boy
Bread
Bestiary
The One Girl at the Boys’ Party
The Couple
A Note About the Author
Part One
Poems for the Dead
I. Public
Ideographs
(a photograph of China, 1905)
The small 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 hands open in sleep.
The other man is awake—he looks
directly at us. He is fixed to a more
complex scaffold, a diagonal cross-piece
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 leg bared.
They are awaiting execution, tilted against 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 dark 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.
All but one descend from the wood
back of the flat-bed truck. He lies,
shoes pointed North and South,
knuckles curled under on the splintered slats,
head thrown back as if he is in a
field, his face tilted up
toward the sky, to get the sun on it, to
darken it more and more toward the color of the human.
Portrait of a Child
(Yerevan, capital of a republic
set up by those Armenians who had
not been massacred by the Turks.
In 1921, Turkey and Russia
divided the republic between them.)
His face is quite peaceful, really,
like any child asleep, though the skin
is darkened in places, the curved eyelids
turgid, part of the ear missing
as if bitten off. He lies like a child
asleep, on his side, one arm bent
so the hand curls near his face, one arm
dangling across his chest, fingertips
touching the stone street. His shirt has
two rents near the waist, the slits hunters make
in the stomach of the catch.
Besides the shirt he wears nothing. His abdomen is
swollen as the belly of a pregnant woman
and sags to one side. His hip-joint bulges,
a bruise. His thigh is big around as a
newborn’s arm, and from hip-bone to knee
the tendon runs sharp as a crease in cloth,
the skin pulling at it. His knees are enormous,
his feet peaceful as in deep sleep,
and across one leg delicately rests
his penis. Pale and lovely there
at the center of the picture, it lies, the source
of the children he would have had, this child
dead of hunger
in Yerevan.
Nevsky Prospekt
(July 1917)
It is an old photo, very black and
very white. One woman
lifts up her heavy skirt as she runs.
A man in a white jacket, his hands
tied behind his back, runs,
his chin stuck out. An old woman
in massive black turns and looks behind her.
A man throws himself onto the pavement.
A child in heavy boots is running
but looks back over his shoulder
at the black and white heap of bodies.
The wide grey stone square
is dotted with fallen inky shapes
and dropped white hats. Everything else is
heaving away like a sea from the noise we
feel in the silence of the photograph
the way the deaf see sound: the terrible
voice of the submachine guns saying
This is more important than your life.
The Death of Marilyn Monroe
The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close the
mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the sides, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.
These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other’s eyes.
Their lives took
a turn—one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him—a place where she
would be waiting,
and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.
The Issues
(Rhodesia, 1978)
Just don’t tell me about the issues.
I can see the pale spider-belly head of the
newborn who lies on the lawn, the web of
veins at the surface of her scalp, her skin
grey and gleaming, the clean line of the
bayonet down the center of her chest.
I see her mother’s face, beaten and
beaten into the shape of a plant,
a cactus with grey spines and broad
dark maroon blooms.
I see her arm stretched out across her baby,
wrist resting, heavily, still, across the
tiny ribs.
Don’t speak to me about
politics. I’ve got eyes, man.
Aesthetics of the Shah
(The poster, up all over town, shows
dissidents about to be executed in Iran)
The first thing you notice
is the skill
used on the ropes, the narrow close-grained
hemp against that black cloth
the bodies are wrapped in. You can see the fine
twist-lines of the twine, dark and
elegant, the intervals exact,
and the delicate loops securing the bagged
bodies to the planks like cradle boards.
The heads are uncovered, just the eyes
bound with rag. Underneath
the mustaches like blood. There is not a
white hair on the whole row,
not a strand. They are young men and
still alive, swaddled to the neck in this
black bunting, the ropes lovely as
spider-lines against wet stone.
Things That Are Worse Than Death
(for Margaret Randall)
You are speaking of Chile,
of the woman who was arrested
with her husband and their five-year-old son.
You tell how the guards tortured the woman, the man, the child,
in front of each other,
“as they like to do.”
Things that are worse than death.
I can see myself taking my son’s ash-blond hair in my fingers,
tilting back his head before he knows what is happening,
slitting his throat, slitting my own throat
to save us that. Things that are worse than death:
this new idea enters my life.
The guard enters my life, the sewage of his body,
“as they like to do.” The eyes of the five-year-old boy, Dago,
watching them with his mother. The eyes of his mother
watching them with Dago. And in my living room as a child,
the word, Dago. And nothing I experienced was worse than death,
life was beautiful as our blood on the stone floor
to save us that—my son’s eyes on me,
my eyes on my son—the ram-boar on our bodies
making us look at our old enemy and bow in welcome,
gracious and eternal death
who permits departure.
II. Private
The Guild
Every night, as my grandfather sat
in the darkened room in front of the fire,
the liquor like fire in his hand, his eye
glittering meaninglessly in the light
from the flames, his glass eye baleful and stony,
a young man sat with him
in silence and darkness, a college boy with
white skin, unlined, a narrow
beautiful face, a broad domed
forehead, and eyes amber as the resin from
trees too young to be cut yet.
This was his son, who sat, an apprentice,
night aft
er night, his glass of coals
next to the old man’s glass of coals,
and he drank when the old man drank, and he learned
the craft of oblivion—that young man
not yet cruel, his hair dark as the
soil that feeds the tree’s roots,
that son who would come to be in his turn
better at this than the teacher, the apprentice
who would pass his master in cruelty and oblivion,
drinking steadily by the flames in the blackness,
that young man my father.
Grandmother Love Poem
Late in her life, when we fell in love,
I’d take her out from the nursing home
for a chaser and two bourbons. She’d crack
a joke sharp as a tin lid
hot from the teeth of the can-opener,
and cackle her crack-corn laugh. Next to her
wit, she prided herself on her hair,
snowy and abundant. She would lift it up
at the nape of the neck, there in the bar,
and under the white, under the salt-and-pepper,
she’d show me her true color,
the color it was when she was a bride:
like her sex in the smoky light she would show me
the pure black.
The Eye
My bad grandfather wouldn’t feed us.
He turned the lights out when we tried to read.
He sat alone in the invisible room
in front of the hearth, and drank. He died
when I was seven, and Grandma had never once
taken anyone’s side against him,
the firelight on his red cold face
reflecting extra on his glass eye.
Today I thought about that glass eye,
and how at night in the big double bed
he slept facing his wife, and how the limp
hole, where his eye had been, was open
towards her on the pillow, and how I am
one-fourth him, a brutal man with a
hole for an eye, and one-fourth her,
a woman who protected no one. I am their
sex, too, their son, their bed, and