The Gold Cell Read online

  ALSO BY SHARON OLDS

  Satan Says

  The Dead and the Living

  The Father

  The Wellspring

  Blood, Tin, Straw

  The Unswept Room

  Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002

  One Secret Thing

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 1987 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

  Poems in this work were originally published in the following publications: The Agni Review, Alcatraz, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Ironwood, Kayak, The Missouri Review, The Nation, The New England Review, The New Yorker, Open Places, The Paris Review, Poetry East, Sierra Madre Review, Sonora Review, and The Yale Review.

  “Cambridge Elegy,” “The Quest,” and “The Month of June: 13½” were originally published in Poetry.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Monthly Review Foundation for permission to reprint “Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor,” by Sharon Olds from Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow et al. Copyright © 1983 by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson. Reprinted by permission of The Monthly Review Foundation.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Olds, Sharon. The gold cell.

  (The Knopf poetry series; 25)

  I. Title.

  PS3565.l34G6 1987 811′.54 86-45511

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76083-8

  v3.1

  For Ursula Goodenough

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One

  Summer Solstice, New York City

  On the Subway

  The Abandoned Newborn

  In the Cell

  The Twin

  The Food-Thief

  The Girl

  Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor

  The Solution

  The Pope’s Penis

  When

  Part Two

  I Go Back to May 1937

  Saturn

  What if God

  History: 13

  The Meal

  Alcatraz

  San Francisco

  Looking at My Father

  Why My Mother Made Me

  Now I Lay Me

  The Chute

  The Blue Dress

  Late Poem to My Father

  June 24

  After 37 Years My Mother Apologizes for My Childhood

  201 Upper Terrace, San Francisco

  Part Three

  California Swimming Pool

  First Boyfriend

  First Sex

  First Love

  Cambridge Elegy

  Still Life

  Greed and Aggression

  It

  Topography

  A Woman in Heat Wiping Herself

  The Premonition

  I Cannot Forget the Woman in the Mirror

  Love in Blood Time

  This

  Part Four

  The Moment the Two Worlds Meet

  Little Things

  The Latest Injury

  The Quest

  Our Son and the Water Shortage

  Liddy’s Orange

  When My Son Is Sick

  The Prayer

  The Signs

  I See My Girl

  The Green Shirt

  Gerbil Funeral

  Mouse Elegy

  The Month of June: 13½

  Boy Out in the World

  Life with Sick Kids

  That Moment

  Looking at Them Asleep

  A Note About the Author

  I

  Summer Solstice, New York City

  By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,

  he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building

  and over the soft, tarry surface

  to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice

  and said if they came a step closer that was it.

  Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,

  the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,

  and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a

  dense shell around his own life,

  life of his children’s father, in case

  the man was armed, and one, slung with a

  rope like the sign of his bounden duty,

  came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building

  like the hole they say is in the top of the head,

  and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.

  The tallest cop approached him directly,

  softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,

  while the man’s leg hung over the lip of the next world

  and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the

  hairy net with its implacable grid was

  unfolded, near the curb, and spread out, and

  stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive at a birth.

  Then they all came a little closer

  where he squatted next to his death, his shirt

  glowing its milky glow like something

  growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then

  everything stopped

  as his body jerked and he

  stepped down from the parapet and went toward them

  and they closed on him, I thought they were going to

  beat him up, as a mother whose child has been

  lost might scream at the child when it’s found, they

  took him by the arms and held him up and

  leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the

  tall cop lit a cigarette

  in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and

  then they all lit cigarettes, and the

  red, glowing ends burned like the

  tiny campfires we lit at night

  back at the beginning of the world.

  On the Subway

  The young man and I face each other.

  His feet are huge, in black sneakers

  laced with white in a complex pattern like a

  set of intentional scars. We are stuck on

  opposite sides of the car, a couple of

  molecules stuck in a rod of energy

  rapidly moving through darkness. He has

  or my white eye imagines he has

  the casual cold look of a mugger,

  alert under lowered eyelids. He is wearing

  red, like the inside of the body

  exposed. I am wearing old fur, the

  whole skin of an animal taken

  and used. I look at his unknown face,

  he looks at my grandmother’s coat, and I don’t

  know if I am in his power—

  he could take my coat so easily, my

  briefcase, my life—

  or if he is in my power, the way I am

  living off his life, eating the steak

  he may not be eating, as if I am taking

  the food from his mouth. And he is black

  and I am white, and without meaning or

  trying to I must profit from our history,

  the way he absorbs the murderous beams of the

  nation’s heart, as black cotton


  absorbs the heat of the sun and holds it. There is

  no way to know how easy this

  white skin makes my life, this

  life he could break so easily, the way I

  think his own back is being broken, the

  rod of his soul that at birth was dark and

  fluid, rich as the heart of a seedling

  ready to thrust up into any available light.

  The Abandoned Newborn

  When they found you, you were not breathing.

  It was ten degrees below freezing, and you were

  wrapped only in plastic. They lifted you

  up out of the litter basket, as one

  lifts a baby out of the crib after nap

  and they unswaddled you from the Sloan’s shopping bag.

  As far as you were concerned it was all over,

  you were feeling nothing, everything had stopped

  some time ago,

  and they bent over you and forced the short

  knife-blade of breath back

  down into your chest, over and

  over, until you began to feel

  the pain of life again. They took you

  from silence and darkness right back

  through birth, the gasping, the bright lights, they

  achieved their miracle: on the second

  day of the new year they brought you

  back to being a boy whose parents

  left him in a garbage can,

  and everyone in the Emergency Room

  wept to see your very small body

  moving again. I saw you on the news,

  the discs of the electrocardiogram

  blazing like medals on your body, your hair

  thick and ruffed as the head of a weed, your

  large intelligent forehead dully

  glowing in the hospital TV light, your

  mouth pushed out as if you are angry, and

  something on your upper lip, a

  dried glaze from your nose,

  and I thought how you are the most American baby,

  child of all of us through your very

  American parents, and through the two young medics,

  Lee Merklin and Frank Jennings,

  who brought you around and gave you their names,

  forced you to resume the hard

  American task you had laid down so young,

  and though I see the broken glass on your path, the

  shit, the statistics—you will be a man who

  wraps his child in plastic and leaves it in the trash—I

  see the light too as you saw it

  forced a second time in silver ice between your lids, I am

  full of joy to see your new face among us,

  Lee Frank Merklin Jennings I am

  standing here in dumb American praise for your life.

  In the Cell

  Sitting in the car at the end of summer, my

  feet on the dashboard, the children in the back

  laughing, my calf gleaming like a crescent moon,

  I notice the hairs are sparser on my legs,

  thinning out as I approach middle age—

  not like some youth whose vigorous hairs

  pulse out of his skin with power while he is

  taking a man’s genitals off as

  slowly as possible, carefully, so as

  not to let him get away, to

  get all he knows out of him first—

  names, locations, human maps of

  human cities, in our common tongue and

  written with our usual alphabet so he can

  rule those maps, change the names of the streets and

  line the people along them to turn the

  small cells of their faces up to him,

  the sun on him like gilding.

  This is what I cannot understand, the

  innocence of his own body, its

  goodness and health, the hairs like sweet

  molasses pouring from the follicles of his forearm and

  cooling in great looping curls

  above the sex of the man he is undoing as

  he himself was made.

  The Twin

  (for Lazarus Colloredo, 17th Century)

  He is a large man, with thick hair

  and a thick moustache. He holds aside his

  cloak, he holds his vest open,

  his shirt open. His twin grows

  from his chest. Canted over backward toward us

  it hangs from him, its arms—jointed like

  chicken wings—springing from its ribs and

  held with slings, its hands cocked,

  the head dangling. Its eyes are closed

  and never did open. Its mouth is open

  and never did close, and though along the jaws

  whiskers appeared, from the mouth there never

  came a sound. The luxuriant hair

  hangs down from its scalp, nearly touching its

  one leg, plump and white, that

  dangles on the man’s thigh. At birth

  they were given one name, but when the man grew up,

  his sleeping twin suspended from him with that

  slight grin of ecstasy on its

  face, floating before him, its skin

  his skin, its genitals buried in his body,

  he had it baptized, naming the heart

  next to his heart. He has placed a lace collar

  around the throat swaying in the air,

  the half-body that at night curls like a

  cat in the curve of his body.

  He looks at us, his gaze direct

  and without expectation, heavy-lidded eyes

  full of weariness, he looks at us

  across his brother, the one he named

  John the Baptist, who goes before him

  into the wilderness.

  The Food-Thief

  (Uganda, drought)

  They drive him along the road in the steady

  conscious way they drove their cattle

  when they had cattle, when they had homes and

  living children. They drive him with pliant

  peeled sticks, snapped from trees

  whose bark cannot be eaten—snapped,

  not cut, no one has a knife, and the trees that can be

  eaten have been eaten leaf and trunk and the

  roots pulled from the ground and eaten.

  They drive him and beat him, a loose circle of

  thin men with sapling sticks,

  driving him along slowly, slowly

  beating him to death. He turns to them

  with all the eloquence of the body, the

  wrist turned out and the vein up his forearm

  running like a root just under the surface, the

  wounds on his head ripe and wet as a

  loam furrow cut back and cut back at

  plough-time to farrow a trench for the seed, his

  eye pleading, the white a dark

  occluded white like cloud-cover on the

  morning of a day of heavy rain.

  His lips are open to his brothers as the body of a

  woman might be open, as the earth itself was

  split and folded back and wet and

  seedy to them once, the lines on his lips

  fine as the thousand tributaries of a

  root-hair, a river, he is asking them for life

  His lips are open to his brothers as the body of a

  woman might be open, as the earth itself was

  split and folded back and wet and

  seedy to them once, the lines on his lips

  fine as the thousand tributaries of a

  root-hair, a river, he is asking them for life

  with his whole body, and they are driving his body

  all the way down the road because

  they know the life he is asking for—

  it is their life.

  The Girl
r />   They chased her and her friend through the woods

  and caught them in a waste clearing, broken

  random bracken, a couple of old mattresses,

  as if the place had been prepared.

  The thin one with straight hair

  started raping her best friend,

  and the curly one stood above her,

  thrust his thumbs back inside her jaws, she was twelve,

  stuck his penis in her mouth and throat

  faster and faster and faster.

  Then the straight-haired one stood up—

  they lay like pulled-up roots at his feet,

  naked 12-year-old girls—he said

  Now you’re going to know what it’s like

  to be shot five times and slaughtered like a pig,

  and they switched mattresses,

  the blond was raping and stabbing her friend,

  the straight-haired one sticking inside her

  in one place and then another,

  the point of his gun pressed deep into her waist,

  she felt a little click in her spin and a

  sting like 7-Up in her head, and then he

  pulled the tree-branch across her throat

  and everything went dark,

  the gym went dark, and her mother’s kitchen,

  even the globes of light on the rounded

  lips of her mother’s nesting bowls went dark.

  When she woke up, she was lying on the cold

  copper-smelling earth, the mattress was pulled up

  over her like a blanket, she saw

  the dead body of her best friend

  and she began to run,

  she came to the edge of the woods and she stepped

  out from the trees, like a wound debriding,

  she walked across the field to the tracks

  and said to the railway brakeman Please, sir. Please, sir.

  At the trial she had to say everything—

  her elder sister helped her with the words—

  she had to sit in the room with them and

  point to them. Now she goes to parties

  but does not smoke, she is a cheerleader,

  she throws her body up in the air

  and kicks her legs and comes home and does the dishes

  and her homework, she has to work hard in math,

  the night over the roof of her bed

  filled with white planets. Every night

  she prays for the soul of her best friend and

  then thanks God for life. She knows

  what all of us want never to know

  and she does a cartwheel, the splits, she shakes the