Stag's Leap Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Sharon Olds

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Cover image: The Stags' Leap design is a registered trademark of Treasury Wine Estates. Used with permission.

  Cover design by Chip Kidd

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Olds, Sharon.

  Stag’s leap / by Sharon Olds.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Poems.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95991-1

  I. Title.

  PS3565.L34S73 2012

  811.54—dc23 2012004426

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  January–December

  While He Told Me

  Unspeakable

  The Flurry

  Material Ode

  Gramercy

  Telling My Mother

  Silence, with Two Texts

  The Last Hour

  Last Look

  Stag’s Leap

  Known to Be Left

  Object Loss

  Poem for the Breasts

  Winter

  Not Going to Him

  Pain I Did Not

  The Worst Thing

  Frontis Nulla Fides

  On the Hearth of the Broken Home

  Love

  The Healers

  Left-Wife Goose

  Something That Keeps

  The Easel

  Approaching Godthåb

  Spring

  Once in a While I Gave Up

  To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now

  French Bra

  My Son’s Father’s Smile

  Not Quiet Enough

  Summer

  Sea-Level Elegy

  Sleekit Cowrin’

  Tiny Siren

  Attempted Banquet

  Fall

  The Haircut

  Crazy

  Discandied

  Bruise Ghazal

  Years Later

  On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult

  Maritime

  Slowly He Starts

  Red Sea

  Running into You

  I’d Ask Him for It

  The Shore

  Poem of Thanks

  Left-Wife Bop

  Years Later

  September 2001, New York City

  What Left?

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications, where some of the poems in this book first appeared.

  Poetry: “The Flurry”

  The New Yorker: “Stag’s Leap,” “Silence, with Two Texts,” “On Reading a Newspaper for the First Time as an Adult”

  Poetry London: “Bruise Ghazal,” “Sleekit Cowrin’ ”

  Southern Review: “Slowly He Starts,” “The Healers”

  TriQuarterly: “To Our Miscarried One, Age Thirty Now,” “Sea-Level Elegy”

  Slate: “Pain I Did Not”

  Green Mountain Review: “Something That Keeps”

  The Atlantic Monthly: “September 2001, New York City”

  The American Poetry Review: “While He Told Me,” “Last Look,” “Material Ode,” “Years Later,” “What Left?,” “The Worst Thing”

  Five Points: “Unspeakable”

  Tracking the Storm: “Object Loss”

  Brick: “I’d Ask Him for It”

  Gulf Coast: “Left-Wife Goose”

  Threepenny Review: “Discandied”

  Ploughshares: “Poem for the Breasts”

  Ontario Review: “Known to Be Left”

  Tin House: “On the Hearth of the Broken Home”

  This book’s title, with its singular stag, is a play on the name of the winery Stags’ Leap. The author is grateful to the makers of Stags’ Leap for generously sharing the image from their label, and for their wines.

  January–December

  While He Told Me

  While he told me, I looked from small thing

  to small thing, in our room, the face

  of the bedside clock, the sepia postcard

  of a woman bending down to a lily.

  Later, when we took off our clothes, I saw

  his deep navel, and the cindery lichen

  skin between the male breasts, and from

  outside the shower curtain’s terrible membrane

  I called out something like flirting to him,

  and he smiled. Before I turned out the light,

  he touched my face, then turned away,

  then the dark. Then every scene I thought of

  I visited accompanied by a death-spirit,

  everything was chilled with it,

  each time I woke, I lay in dreading

  bliss to feel and hear him sigh

  and snore. Near sunrise, behind overcast, he got

  up to go in and read on the couch,

  as he often did,

  and in a while I followed him,

  as I often had,

  and snoozed on him, while he read, and he laid

  an arm across my back. When I opened

  my eyes, I saw two tulips stretched

  away from each other extreme in the old

  vase with the grotto carved out of a hill

  and a person in it, underground,

  praying, my imagined shepherd in make-believe paradise.

  Unspeakable

  Now I come to look at love

  in a new way, now that I know I’m not

  standing in its light. I want to ask my

  almost-no-longer husband what it’s like to not

  love, but he does not want to talk about it,

  he wants a stillness at the end of it.

  And sometimes I feel as if, already,

  I am not here—to stand in his thirty-year

  sight, and not in love’s sight,

  I feel an invisibility

  like a neutron in a cloud chamber buried in a mile-long

  accelerator, where what cannot

  be seen is inferred by what the visible

  does. After the alarm goes off,

  I stroke him, my hand feels like a singer

  who sings along him, as if it is

  his flesh that’s singing, in its full range,

  tenor of the higher vertebrae,

  baritone, bass, contrabass.

  I want to say to him, now, What

  was it like, to love me—when you looked at me,

  what did you see? When he loved me, I looked

  out at the world as if from inside

  a profound dwelling, like a burrow, or a well, I’d gaze

  up, at noon, and see Orion

  shining—when I thought he loved me, when I thought

  we were joined not just for breath’s time,

  but for the long continuance,

  the hard candies of femur and stone,

  the fastnesses. He shows no anger,

  I show no anger but in flashes of humor,

  all is courtesy and horror. And after

  the first minute, when I say, Is this about

  her, and he says, No, it’s about

  you, we do not speak of her.

  The Flurry

  When we talk about when to tell the kids,

  we are so to
gether, so concentrated.

  I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’m

  the killer”—taking my wrist—he says,

  holding it. He is sitting on the couch,

  the worn indigo chintz around him,

  rich as a night tide, with jellies,

  I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him

  as if within some chamber of matedness,

  some dust I carry around me. Tonight,

  to breathe its Magellanic field is less

  painful, maybe because he is drinking

  a wine grown where I was born—fog,

  eucalyptus, sempervirens—and I’m

  sharing the glass with him. “Don’t catch

  my cold,” he says, “—oh that’s right, you want

  to catch my cold.” I should not have told him that,

  I tell him I will try to fall out of

  love with him, but I feel I will love him

  all my life. He says he loves me

  as the mother of our children, and new troupes

  of tears mount to the acrobat platforms

  of my ducts and do their burning leaps,

  some of them jump straight sideways, and for a

  moment, I imagine a flurry

  of tears like a wirra of knives thrown

  at a figure to outline it—a heart’s spurt

  of rage. It glitters, in my vision, I nod

  to it, it is my hope.

  Material Ode

  O tulle, O taffeta, O grosgrain—

  I call upon you now, girls,

  of fabrics and the woman I sing. My husband

  had said he was probably going to leave me—not

  for sure, but likely, maybe—and no, it did not

  have to do with her. O satin, O

  sateen, O velvet, O fucking velveeta—

  the day of the doctors’ dress-up dance,

  the annual folderol, the lace,

  the net, he said it would be hard for her

  to see me there, dancing with him,

  would I mind not going. And since I’d been

  for thirty years enarming him,

  I enarmed him further—Arma, Virumque,

  sackcloth, ashen embroidery! As he

  put on his tux, I saw his slight

  smirk into the mirror, as he did his bow tie,

  but after more than three decades, you have some

  affection for each other’s little faults,

  and it suited me to cherish the belief

  no meanness could happen between us. Fifty-

  fifty we had made the marriage,

  fifty-fifty its demise. And when he came

  home and shed his skin, Reader,

  I slept with him, thinking it meant

  he was back, his body was speaking for him,

  and as it spoke, its familiar sang

  from the floor, the old-boy tie. O silk,

  O slub, O cocoon stolen. It is something

  our species does, isn’t it,

  we take what we can. Or else there’d be grubs

  who kept people, in rooms, to produce

  placentas for the larvae’s use, there would be

  a cow who would draw from our wombs our unborn

  offspring, to make of them shoes for a calf.

  O bunny-pajamas of children! Love

  where loved. O babies’ flannel sleeper

  with a slice of cherry pie on it.

  Love only where loved! O newborn suit

  with a smiling worm over the heart, it is

  forbidden to love where we are not loved.

  Gramercy

  The last time we slept together—

  and then I can’t remember when

  it was, I used to be a clock

  of sleeping together, and now it drifts,

  in me, somewhere, the knowledge, in one of those

  washes on maps of deserts, those spacious

  wastes—the last time, he paused,

  at some rest stop, some interval

  between the unrollings, he put his palm

  on my back, between the shoulder blades.

  It was as if he were suing for peace,

  asking if this could be over—maybe not

  just this time, but over. He was solid

  within me, suing for peace. And I

  subsided, but then my bright tail

  lolloped again, and I whispered, Just one

  more?, and his indulgent grunt

  seemed, to me, to have pleasure, and even

  affection, in it—and my life, as it

  was incorporated in flesh, was burst with the

  sweet smashes again. And then

  we lay and looked at each other—or I looked

  at him, into his eyes. Maybe that

  was the last time—not knowing

  it was last, not solemn, yet that signal given,

  that hand laid down on my back, not a gauntlet

  but a formal petition for reprieve, a sign for Grant Mercy.

  Telling My Mother

  Outside her window, a cypress, under

  the weight of the Pacific wind,

  was bending luxuriously. To tell

  my mother that my husband is leaving me…

  I took her on a walk, taking her fleshless

  hand like a passerine’s claw, I bought her

  a doughnut and a hairnet, I fed her. On the gnarled

  magnolia, in the fog, the blossoms and buds were like

  all the moons in one night—full,

  gibbous, crescent. I’d practiced the speech,

  bringing her up toward the truth slowly,

  preparing her. And the moment I told her,

  she looked at me in shock and dismay.

  But when will I ever see him again?!

  she cried out. I held hands with her,

  and steadied us, joking. Above her spruce, through the

  coastal mist, for a moment, a small,

  dry, sandy, glistering star. Then I

  felt in my whole body, for a second,

  that I have not loved enough—I could almost

  see my husband’s long shape,

  wraithing up. I did not know him,

  I did not work not to lose him, and I lost him,

  and I’ve told my mother. And it’s clear from her harrowed

  sorrowing cheeks and childhood mountain-lake

  eyes that she loves me. So the men are gone,

  and I’m back with Mom. I always feared this would happen,

  I thought it would be a pure horror,

  but it’s just home, Mom’s house

  and garden, earth, olive and willow,

  beech, orchid, and the paperweight

  dusted with opal, inside it the arms of a

  nebula raking its heavens with a soft screaming.

  Silence, with Two Texts

  When we lived together, the silence in the home

  was denser than the silence would be

  after he left. Before, the silence

  was like a large commotion of industry

  at a distance, like the downroar of mining. When he went,

  I studied my once-husband’s silence like an almost

  holy thing, the call of a newborn born

  mute. Text: “Though its presence is detected

  by the absence of what it negates, silence

  possesses a power which presages fear

  for those in its midst. Unseen, unheard,

  unfathomable, silence dis-

  concerts because it conceals.” Text:

  “The waters compassed me about, even to

  the soul: the depth closed me round

  about, the weeds were wrapped about

  my head.” I lived alongside him, in his hush

  and reserve, sometimes I teased him, calling his

  abstracted mask his Alligator Look,

  seeking how to accept him as

  he was, under the law
that he could not

  speak—and when I shrieked against the law

  he shrinked down into its absolute,

  he rose from its departure gate.

  And he seemed almost like a hero, to me,

  living, as I was, under the law

  that I could not see the one I had chosen

  but only consort with him as a being

  fixed as an element, almost

  ideal, no envy or meanness. In the last

  weeks, by day we moved through the tearing

  apart, along its length, of the union,

  and by night silence lay down with blindness,

  and sang, and saw.

  The Last Hour

  Suddenly, the last hour

  before he took me to the airport, he stood up,

  bumping the table, and took a step

  toward me, and like a figure in an early

  science fiction movie he leaned

  forward and down, and opened an arm,

  knocking my breast, and he tried to take some

  hold of me, I stood and we stumbled,

  and then we stood, around our core, his

  hoarse cry of awe, at the center,

  at the end, of our life. Quickly, then,

  the worst was over, I could comfort him,

  holding his heart in place from the back

  and smoothing it from the front, his own

  life continuing, and what had

  bound him, around his heart—and bound him

  to me—now lying on and around us,

  sea-water, rust, light, shards,

  the little eternal curls of eros

  beaten out straight.

  Last Look

  In the last minute of our marriage, I looked into

  his eyes. All that day until then, I had been

  comforting him, for the shock he was in

  at his pain—the act of leaving me

  took him back, to his own early

  losses. But now it was time to go beyond

  comfort, to part. And his eyes seemed to me,

  still, like the first ocean, wherein

  the blue-green algae came into their early

  language, his sea-wide iris still

  essential, for me, with the depths in which

  our firstborn, and then our second, had turned,

  on the sides of their tongues the taste buds for the moon-bland

  nectar of our milk—our milk. In his gaze,

  rooms of the dead; halls of loss; fog-