The Gold Cell
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
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