One Secret Thing Read online

  ALSO BY SHARON OLDS

  Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002

  The Unswept Room

  Blood, Tin, Straw

  The Wellspring

  The Father

  The Gold Cell

  The Dead and the Living

  Satan Says

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2008 by Sharon Olds

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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Olds, Sharon.

  One secret thing / by Sharon Olds.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80437-2

  I. Title.

  PS3565.l34O54 2008

  811′.54—dc22

  2008019607

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  Everything

  PART ONE: War

  War

  1. Woman with the Lettuce

  2. Legless Fighter Pilot

  3. What Could Happen

  4. The Dead

  5. When He Came for the Family

  6. The Signal

  7. The Leader

  8. The Smile

  9. Free Shoes

  10. The Body-Sniffers

  11. His Crew

  12. The Body

  PART TWO: The Cannery

  The Cannery, 1942–1945

  Diagnosis

  At Night

  Behavior Chart

  Calvinist Parents

  Money

  Fly on the Wall in the Puritan Home

  Maiden Name

  Men’s Singles, 1952

  The Float

  Freezer

  The Bra

  The Couldn’t

  Home Theater, 1955

  Paterfamilias

  Easter 1960

  PART THREE: Umbilicus

  Umbilicus

  When Our Firstborn Slept In

  Toth Farry

  Home Ec

  The Space Heater

  Barbarous Artifacts

  Animal Dress

  Royal Beauty Bright

  Self-Exam

  The Riser

  Wooden Ode

  The Scare

  Pansy Coda

  Last Words, Death Row, Circa 2030

  Self-Portrait, Rear View

  The Dead

  Sleeves

  Good Measure

  PART FOUR: Cassiopeia

  Cassiopeia

  1. He Is Taken Away

  2. The Music

  3. The Ecstatic

  4. Two Late Dialogues

  Mom as Comet

  Her Creed

  5. Warily, Sportsman!

  6. Little End Ode

  7. Something Is Happening

  8. Cassiopeia

  PART FIVE: One Secret Thing

  Still Life

  One Secret Thing

  The Last Evening

  Last Hour

  To See My Mother

  When I Left Her

  Western Wind

  Satin Maroon

  Nereid Elegy

  A Note About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to the editors of the following publications where these poems, some of which have been revised, first appeared:

  The American Poetry Review: “Money,” “Maiden Name,”

  “Paterfamilias,” “When Our Firstborn Slept In,” “The Scare,”

  “Pansy Coda,” “The Music,” “Two Late Dialogues,” “Little End Ode,” “Last Hour,” “Mom as Comet”

  Antioch Review: “Free Shoes”

  Brick: “The Float”

  Five Points: “Behavior Chart,” “Good Measure”

  Massachusetts Review: “The Body”

  The Missouri Review: “What Could Happen”

  Ms.: “One Secret Thing”

  The New England Review: “The Leader”

  The New Yorker: “Easter 1960,” “The Space Heater,” “Self-Exam,” “The Last Evening,” “Her Creed”

  The Paris Review: “Calvinist Parents”

  Ploughshares: “The Couldn’t”

  Poetry: “Legless Fighter Pilot,” “When He Came for the Family,” “The Signal,” “Home Ec,” “Still Life”

  Poetry London: “Animal Dress,” “Satin Maroon”

  Tin House: “At Night”

  Tri-Quarterly: “Western Wind”

  Everything

  Most of us are never conceived.

  Many of us are never born—

  we live in a private ocean for hours,

  weeks, with our extra or missing limbs,

  or holding our poor second head,

  growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,

  sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp

  and whelk, are culled in our early months.

  And some who are born live only for minutes,

  others for two, or for three, summers,

  or four, and when they go, everything

  goes—the earth, the firmament—

  and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.

  PART ONE: War

  War

  1. Woman with the Lettuce

  They are crowded in a line being shoved toward a truck.

  Some seem stunned, some sick with fear.

  She stands slightly outside the line,

  black hat clamped on her head,

  mouth compressed. In her hands she holds

  an oversized lettuce, its white stems and

  great, pale, veined leaves

  unfolded in the dense air. She stares

  directly at the camera, the large, delicate

  plant in her grip, its glowing vanes

  reaching out. Furious, she takes her

  last chance to look right at us.

  2. Legless Fighter Pilot

  He takes his right calf in his hand,

  lifts the whole leg up, straight,

  turns, and swings it into the cockpit,

  sliding into the seat. The left leg he

  bends by hand at the knee, pulls it in, and

  slams the hatch, then in his aircraft

  he rises over the hills. In the sky

  no one can walk, everyone

  is a sitting duck, he banks and begins to hunt.

  He is not afraid of anything now,

  not even his coffin—hell, he is part

  native oak already, and if he

  lost his arms he’d replace them. All he

  wants is to bag as many as he can,

  crash them into the ground like birds into a sack with their

  useless legs trailing out the mouth of it.

  3. What Could Happen

  When the men and women went into hiding,

  they knew what could happen if the others caught them.

  They knew their bodies might be undone,

  their sexual organs taken as if

  to destroy the mold so the human could not

  be made anymore. They knew what the others

  went for—the center of the body,

  and not just for the agony and horror but to

  send them crudely barren into death,

  throwing those bodies down in the village at dawn

  to show that all was ended. But each

  ti
me the others dumped a body in the square,

  a few more people took to the woods,

  as if springing up, there,

  from the loam dark as the body’s wound.

  4. The Dead

  The ground was frozen, the coffin-wood burned

  for fuel. So the dead were covered with something

  and taken on a child’s sled to the cemetery

  in the subzero air. They lay on the snow,

  some wrapped in rough cloth

  bound with rope, like the tree’s ball of roots

  when it waits to be planted; others wound

  in sheets, their gauze, tapered shapes

  stiff as cocoons which will split down the center

  when the new life inside is prepared;

  but most lay like corpses, their coverings

  coming loose, naked calves

  hard as corded wood spilling

  from under a tarp, a hand reaching out

  as if to the bread made of glue and sawdust,

  to the icy winter, and the siege.

  5. When He Came for the Family

  They looked at their daughter standing with her music

  in her hand, the page covered with dots and

  lines, with its shared language. They knew

  families had been taken. What they did not know

  was the way he would pick her cello up

  by the scroll neck and take its amber

  torso-shape and lift it and break it

  against the fireplace. The brickwork crushed the

  close-grained satiny wood, they stood and

  stared at him.

  6. The Signal

  When they brought his body back, they told

  his wife how he’d died:

  the general thought they had taken the beach,

  and sent in his last reserves. In the smokescreen,

  the boats moved toward shore. Her husband

  was the first man in the first boat

  to move through the smoke and see the sand

  dark with bodies, the tanks burning,

  the guns thrown down, the landing craft

  wrecked and floored with blood. In the path of the

  bullets and shells from the shore, her husband had

  put on a pair of white gloves

  and turned his back on the enemy,

  motioning to the boats behind him

  to turn back. After everyone else

  on his boat was dead

  he continued to signal, then he, too,

  was killed, but the other boats had seen him

  and turned back. They gave his wife the medal,

  and she buried him, and at night floated through

  a wall of smoke, and saw him at a distance

  standing in a boat, facing her,

  the gloves blazing on his hands as he motioned her back.

  7. The Leader

  Seeing the wind at the airport blowing on his hair,

  lifting it up where it was slicked down, you

  want to say to the wind, Stop, that’s

  the leader’s hair, but the wind keeps lifting it

  and separating the thin strands and

  fanning it out like a weed-head in the air.

  His brows look bright in the airport glare,

  his eyes are crinkled up against the sun, you

  want to say to his eyes, Stop, you are

  the leader’s eyes, close yourselves, but they are

  on his side, no part of his body

  can turn against him. His thumbnail is long and

  curved—it will not slit his throat for the

  sake of the million children; his feet in their

  polished shoes won’t walk him into the

  propeller and end the war. His heart won’t

  cease to beat, even if it knows

  whose heart it is—it has no loyalty to

  other hearts, it has no future outside his body.

  And you can’t suddenly tell his mind that it is

  his mind, get out while it can,

  it already knows that it’s his mind—

  much of its space is occupied with the

  plans for the marble memorial statues

  when he dies of old age. They’ll place one

  in every capital city of his nation

  around the world—Lagos, Beijing,

  São Paolo, New York, London, Baghdad,

  Sydney, Paris, Jerusalem,

  a giant statue of him, Friend to the Children

  of the leader’s country—

  which will mean all children, then,

  all those living.

  8. The Smile

  The man hunched on the ground, holding

  the arm of the corpse, is smiling. And the man

  bending over, stabbing the chest,

  a look of pleasant exertion on his face,

  is smiling. The man lying on the ground is

  staring up, shirt splattered black

  like splashes around a well where the bucket has been

  dipped and dipped. They hold his wrists, as if

  displaying his span, a large bird

  slung from its heavy wing tips,

  and the handsome young man goes on stabbing

  and smiling, and the other sits on the ground

  holding the dead arm like a leash, smiling.

  9. Free Shoes

  The pairs of shoes stand in rows,

  polished and jet, like coffins for small pets,

  lined with off-white. Evacuated children

  sit in rows eyeing the pairs,

  child after child after child, no parents

  anywhere near. When it’s their turn,

  they get a pair of new shoes

  and the old ones are taken away.

  Of course it is kind of the nice people

  to give them the shoes. Of course it is better

  to be here in the country, not there where the buildings

  explode and hurl down pieces of children.

  Of course, of course. This life that has been

  given them like a task! This life, this

  black bright narrow unbroken-in shoe.

  10. The Body-Sniffers

  Eventually, they found the people

  who could tell by the smell whether or not

  someone was alive in the ruins. They would crouch,

  move their heads above holes in the rubble,

  and after a while they’d say Yes, there is something,

  someone. They’d inhale some more,

  lying flat on the planks, the odor

  trickling up, into their brains, and

  sometimes they’d say, It’s too late, here.

  Other times the blood was still flowing and

  then the large beams would be hoisted, the

  pipes cut, the bricks lifted,

  foot by foot they’d go down and the sniffer would

  say, Keep going, someone’s there! They’d dig day and

  night without sleep to see the eyelids

  flutter, to smell the fresh, dissolved salt.

  11. His Crew

  Burning, he kept the plane up

  long enough for the crew to jump. He could

  feel the thrust down, and the lift,

  each time one of them leapt, full-term, the

  parachutes unfolding and glistening, little

  sacs of afterbirth. They drifted toward

  what could be long lives, his fist

  seared to the stick. When he’d felt all six

  leave him, he put the nose down

  and saw the earth coming up toward him,

  green as a great basin of water

  being lifted to his face.

  12. The Body

  The body lies, dropped down on the stones,

  pieces of plastic and steel in it, it is

  not breathing, it cannot make its

  heart pump no matter how hard it tries.
/>   It tries to move its left hand,

  its left foot—its lips, tongue,

  it cannot cry, it cannot feel,

  the lovely one is gone, the one who

  rode it, rider on a mount, the one who had

  a name and spoke. It lies on the rocks in its

  camouflage, canteen at its belt,

  probably still holding water,

  and it can’t do anything, it can’t even

  get at the water, they will put it in a pit,

  cover it over, it will never feel

  that vivid one

  wake in it.

  PART TWO: The Cannery

  The Cannery, 1942–1945

  When we’d visit it, down the street,

  in the grammar school, I was so young

  I sat on my mother’s forearm, and gazed at the

  stainless retort where the cylinders

  of tinned iron and sheet metal,

  hermetically sealed, glided, at a slant,

  like a column of soldered soldiers, single-

  file, down along the slatted chrome

  ramp from the flame-sterilizers

  in the requisitioned lunchroom. The woman

  who ran that home-front cannery was

  shorter than I from my perch, she was heavy, she had

  short hair, and she moved with purpose,

  there in her war-effort kitchen. I thought she had

  invented the machine, and owned it, down would

  soar, shoulder to shoulder, the ranks of

  rations, as if we could see the clever

  workings of her mind. When the war ended,

  and the little factory was dismantled, she killed

  herself. I didn’t know what it meant,

  what she had done, as if she had canned

  her own spirit. I wish I could thank her

  for showing me a woman Hephaistos

  at her forge fire. My mother held me up

  as if to be blessed by her. I wish her

  heaven could have been the earth she had been desiring.

  Diagnosis

  By the time I was six months old, she knew something

  was wrong with me. I got looks on my face

  she had not seen on any child

  in the family, or the extended family,

  or the neighborhood. My mother took me in

  to the pediatrician with the kind hands,