Arias Read online

  ALSO BY SHARON OLDS

  Odes

  Stag’s Leap

  One Secret Thing

  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 © 2019 by Sharon Olds

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

  www.aaknopf.com

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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Olds, Sharon, author.

  Title: Arias / by Sharon Olds.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Knopf, 2019. | “This is a Borzoi book.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019007458 (print) | LCCN 2019008791 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525656944 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525656937 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524711603 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / American / General.

  Classification: LCC PS3565.L34 (ebook) | LCC PS3565.L34 A6 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019007458

  Ebook ISBN 9780525656944

  Cover design by Carol Devine Carson

  v5.4

  ep

  For Carolyn and Forrest

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Sharon Olds

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Meeting a Stranger

  For You

  Looking South at Lower Manhattan, Where the Towers Had Been

  Meeting a Stranger

  No Makeup

  A Pair of Sonnets Against the Corporal Chastisement of Children

  Poem to Etan Patz

  Poem Which Talks Back to Me

  Birds in Alcoves

  8 Moons

  My Father’s Whiteness

  State Evidence

  Sweet Land of Liberty

  White Woman in White Makeup

  Apocalypse Approaching as I’m Aging

  My Godlessness

  Seas to Rise Forty Feet

  Arias

  Aria to Our Miscarried One, Age 50 Now

  Aria Above Seattle

  Anal Aria

  Bay Area Aria

  Bonnard Aria

  Breaking Bad Aria

  Cervix Aria

  Calabash Aria

  California Aria

  Departure Gate Aria

  Early Pastoral Aria

  Fear of Motherhood Aria

  Global Aria

  Gliss Aria

  Graduation Aria

  Hyacinth Aria

  Immigration Aria

  Jockey Aria

  Kunitzeiform Aria

  Long-Playing Aria

  Mortal Aria

  Morning Aria, 6,000 Feet

  Nevada City, California, Aria

  Object Permanence Aria

  Pasadena Aria

  Pugilist Aria

  Q Aria

  Rasputin Aria

  Sepia Aria

  Silver Spoon Aria

  Scansion Aria

  Scrapbook Aria

  Timothy Aria

  Tailbone Aria

  Uncombed Aria

  Vermont Aria

  Waist Aria

  X Y Z Aria

  Run Away Up

  I Cannot Say I Did Not

  Mourning Undone

  First Breath

  The Task of Naming Me

  My First Two Weeks,

  Coda, for Coda and Codette

  201 Upper Terrace Snapshot

  Theme Psalm

  On Truth Serum, Seventy Years Ago, My Mother Chats

  Run Away Up

  The Green Duck

  Dream of Mrs. Sly

  I Think My Mother

  How the Buttermilk Was Administered to the Child at the True Blue Cafeteria

  I Do Not Know If It Is True, but I Think

  How It Felt

  Easter Morning, 1955

  Phobia of Red

  Easter Morning, 1960

  Cold Tahoe Today

  Never Saw

  Sex with Love

  My Father Happened on a Poem of Mine in a Magazine

  Nemo me impune lacessit

  The Enchantment

  Like a Sonnet

  Varicosonnet

  From the Window of My Home-Town Hotel

  My Poem Without Me in It

  Where I Die

  The New Knowing

  What Thou Lovest Well

  Remembering the First Time

  After Divorce

  Where Is It Now

  The New Knowing

  First Boyfriend After

  Boyfriend Blues at 55

  Boyfriend Lament

  Go

  When My Fear That I Won’t

  Unexpected Flourishing

  Elegies

  1

  Hospice-Bed Song

  After Closing Up My Mother’s House

  The Relics

  Dawn Song

  Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater

  In the Temple Basement

  Let the Night

  As If My Mother

  Blossom Trees

  Holding to a Sea-Wall, Treading Salt Water,

  Where Is My Lady?

  Where She Is Now

  Double Elegy

  My Parents’ Ashes (New York City, October, 2001)

  2

  On the Bank of the Columbia River

  Morphine Elegy

  Last Day with My Father’s Wife

  3

  Burial Day

  Big Boy Blue

  Landing in San Francisco on the Way to the Community of Writers (with a line from Tom Waits)

  Song to Gabriel Hirsch

  Tory Dent Elegy, Big Sur

  Garlic Elegy

  Sonnet for Joe of Nazareth

  Morning Song

  Stanley’s Mouth

  Animal Crackers

  Song Before Dawn

  Vigil

  Sacred

  First Child

  The First New Human Animal

  When You Were
First Visible

  First Child

  Aria Conceived in Mexico

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Meeting a Stranger

  For You

  In the morning, when I’m pouring the hot milk

  into the coffee, I put the side of my

  face near the convex pitcher, to watch

  the last, round drop from the spout—

  and it feels like being cheek to cheek

  with a baby. Sometimes the orb pops back up,

  a ball of cream balanced on a whale’s

  watery exhale. Then I gather the tools

  of my craft, the cherry sounding-board tray

  for my lap, like the writing-arm of a desk,

  the phone, the bird book for looking up

  the purple martin. I repeat them as I seek them,

  so as not to forget: tray, cell phone,

  purple martin; tray, phone,

  martin, Trayvon Martin, song was

  invented for you, all art was made

  for you, painting, writing, was yours,

  our youngest, our most precious, to remind us

  to shield you—all was yours, all that is

  left on earth, with your body, was for you.

  Looking South at Lower Manhattan, Where the Towers Had Been

  If we see harm approaching someone—

  if you see me starting to talk about

  something I know nothing about,

  like the death of someone who’s a stranger to me,

  step between me and language. This morning,

  I am seeing it more clearly, that song

  can be harmful, in its ignorance

  which does not know itself as ignorance.

  I have crossed the line, as the line was crossed

  with me. I need to apologize

  to the letters of the alphabet,

  to the elements of the periodic

  table, to O, and C, and H,

  oxygen, carbon, hydrogen,

  which make up most of a human body—

  body which breaks down, in fire,

  to the elements it was composed of, and all that is

  left is ashes, sacred ashes

  of strangers, carbon and nitrogen,

  and the rest departs as carbon dioxide and is

  breathed in, by those nearby,

  the living who knew us and the living who did not

  know us. I apologize

  to nitrogen, to calcium with the

  pretty box-shape of its crystal structure,

  I apologize to phosphorus,

  and potassium, that raw bright metal

  we contain, and to sodium and sulfur, and to

  the trace amounts which are in us somewhere like the

  stars in the night—copper, zinc,

  cobalt, iron, arsenic, lead,

  I am singing, I am singing against myself, as if

  rushing toward someone my song might be approaching,

  to shield them from it.

  Meeting a Stranger

  When I meet you, it’s not just the two of us meeting.

  Your mother is there, and your father is there,

  and my mother and father. And our people—back from our

  folks, back—are there, and what they

  might have had to do with each other;

  if one of yours, and one of mine

  had met, what might have happened is there

  in the room with us. They are shadowy,

  compared to us, they are quivers of reflected

  light on a wall. And if I were

  a German, and you a Jew, or I a

  Jew and you a Palestinian,

  or, as this morning, when you are an African

  American woman, and I am a WASP,

  one of your family might have been taken

  from their home, and brought through murder to murder

  by one of my family. It is there in the air

  with us. And if you’re a woman in the city

  where you live, and I am staying at

  the hotel where you work, and if you have brought me

  my breakfast on a tray—though you and I have not

  met, before, we are breathing in

  our lineages, together. And whether

  there is guilt in the room, or not, or blame,

  there is the history of human evil,

  and the shame, in me, that someone I could be

  related to, could have committed,

  against someone you are related to, some

  horror. And in the room, there is

  a question, alive—would I have risked harm

  to try to protect you, as I hope I would risk it

  for a cousin, a niece, or would I have stood

  aside, in the ordinary cowardice and self-

  interest of my flesh now sharing your breath,

  your flesh my breath.

  No Makeup

  Maybe one reason I do not wear makeup is to scare people.

  If they’re close enough, they can see something is different with me,

  something unnerving, as if I have no features,

  I am embryonic, pre-eyebrows, pre-eyelids, pre-mouth,

  I am like a water bear talking to them,

  or an amniotic traveler,

  a vitreous floater on their own eyeball,

  human ectoplasm risen on its hind legs to discourse with them.

  And such a white white girl, such a sickly toadstool,

  so pale, a visage of fog, a phiz of

  mist above a graveyard, no magenta roses,

  no floral tribute, no goddess, no grown-up

  woman, no acknowledgment

  of the drama of secondary sexual characteristics, just the

  gray matter of spirit talking,

  the thin features of a gray girl in a gray graveyard—

  granite, ash, chalk, dust.

  I tried the paint, but I could feel it on my skin, I could

  hardly move, under the mask of my

  desire to be seen as attractive in the female

  way of 1957,

  and I could not speak. And when the makeup came off I felt

  actual as a small mammal in the woods

  with a speaking countenance—or a basic

  primate, having all the expressions

  which evolved in us, to communicate.

  If my teenage acne had left scars,

  if my skin were rough, instead of soft,

  I probably couldn’t afford to hate makeup,

  or to fear so much the beauty salon or the

  very idea of beautyship.

  And my mother was beautiful—did I say this?

  In my small eyes, and my smooth withered skin,

  you can see my heart, you can read my naked lips.

  A Pair of Sonnets Against the Corporal Chastisement of Children

  Blows That Fall on a Child

  Blows don’t fall. Feathers fall,

  and are dropped from towers. Leaves fall.

  Dictionaries fall from towers—

  the speed of their fall accelerates,

  and the rate of the acceleration

  accelerates. What falls is something

  let go of, something gravity

  is hauling to it, to tiramisu it—

  dessert that says pull me to you. The liver

  and lights of the body that the blow strikes are no
t

  magnets, the blow is neither drawn

  to its objects nor floated down from its source—

  a blow is driven, by an engine, it is

  the expression of a heart.

  The Progeny of Punishment

  They inherit the earth. They crawl on it,

  they pull themselves up, they walk, they look up,

  they do not know which visage they will see

  above them—the crescent, or the waxing gibbous,

  seas and craters of the eyes nose mouth.

  Sometimes the cycle has a pattern, sometimes