The Dead and the Living Read online

  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