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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
a doctor with a name like a suit size for a wheel:
Hub Long. My mom did not tell him
what she thought in truth, that I was Possessed.
It was just these strange looks on my face—
he held me, and conversed with me,
chatting as one does with a baby, and my mother
said, She’s doing it now! Look!
She’s doing it now! and the doctor said,
What your daughter has
is called a sense
of humor. Ohhh, she said, and took me
back to the house where that sense would be tested
and found to be incurable.
At night my mother tucked me in, with a
jamming motion—her fingertips
against the swag of sheets and blankets
hanging down, where the acme angle of the
Sealy Posturepedic met
the zenith angle of the box spring—she shoved,
stuffing, doubling the layers, suddenly
tightening the bed, racking it one notch
smaller, so the sheets pressed me like a fierce
restraint. I was my mother’s squeeze,
my mother was made of desire leashed.
And my sister and I shared a room—
my mother tucked me in like a pinch,
with a shriek, then wedged my big sister in, with a
softer eek, we were like the parts of a
sexual part, squeaky and sweet,
the room full of girls was her blossom, the house was my
mother’s bashed, pretty ship, she
battened us down, this was our home,
she fastened us down in it, in her sight,
as a part of herself, and she had welcomed that part—
embraced it, nursed it, tucked it in, turned out the light.
There was one for each child, hand-ruled
with the ivory ruler—horizontal
the chores and sins, vertical
the days of the week. And my brother’s and sister’s
charts were spangled with gold stars,
as if those five-point fetlocks of brightness were
the moral fur they were curly with, young
anti-Esaus of the house, and my chart
was a mess of pottage marks, some slots filled
in so hard you could see where the No. 2
Mongol had broken—the rug under the grid
fierce with lead-thorns. My box score
KO, KO, I was Lucifer’s knockout, yet it
makes me laugh now to remember my chart.
Affection for my chart?! As if I am looking
back on matter—my siblings’ stars armed
figures of value, and my x’ed-out boxes
a chambered hatchery of minor
evils, spiny sea-stars, the small
furies of a child’s cross tidal heart.
Sometime during the Truman Administration,
Sharon Olds’s parents tied her to a chair,
and she is still writing about it.
—review of
The Unswept Room
My father was a gentleman, and he expected
us to be gentlemen. If we did not observe
the niceties of etiquette he whopped
us with his belt. He had a strong arm,
and boy did we feel it.
—Prescott Sheldon Bush,
brother to a president and
uncle to another
They put roofs over our heads.
Ours was made of bent tiles,
so the edge of the roof had a broken look,
as if a lot of crockery
had been thrown down, onto the home—
a dump for heaven’s cheap earthenware.
Along the eaves, the arches were like
entries to the Colosseum
where a lion might appear, or an eight-foot armored
being with the painted face
of a simpering lady. Bees would not roost
in those concave combs, above our rooms,
birds not swarm. How does a young ’un
pay for room and board? They put a
roof over our heads, against lightning,
and droppings—no foreign genes, no outside
gestures, no unfamilial words;
and under that roof, they labored as they had been
labored over, they beat us into swords.
Filthy lucre, dough, lettuce,
jack, folderola, wherewithal, the ready,
simoleons, fins, tenners, I savored
the smell of money, sour, like ink,
and salty-dirty, like strangers’ thumbs,
we touch it like our mutual skin
tattooed with webs—orb and ray—and with
Abe, and laurel leaves, and Doric
pillars, and urns, acanthus, mint scales,
a key I liked the feel of it,
like old, flannel pajamas, the fiber
worn to a gloss, and the 2 × 6
classic size, which does not change
from generation unto generation as the
hand grows to encompass it—
and I liked the numerals, the curly
5, and the 1 the grandmother president
seems to be guarding,
as if the government would protect your identity
if they could find it, and they didn’t have to kill
too many of your relatives
to get at it. Poor identity,
glad-handed so long, the triangle head all
eye, over the pyramid torso,
parent over child, rock over scissors,
ANNUIT
COEPTIS
over
NOVUS
ORDO
SECLORUM
. A dime a week
if you did your jobs and did not act morally
horrible, which meant, for some, a dime
a year. Now if my mom had paid me, to hit me,
I could have had a payola account,
and been a child whore magnate. No question
what it meant, to see the interest mount up,
the wad of indenture, legal tender—
no question to me what a bill was,
its cry sounded like the diesel train’s
green cry, it was a ticket to ride.
And then I become a fly on the wall
of that room, where the corporal punishment
was done. The humans who are in it mean little
to me—not the offspring, nor the off-sprung—
I turn my back and with maxillae and palps
clean my arms: in each of the hundred
eyes of both my compound eyes,
one wallpaper rose. And if I turn back,
and the two-legged insect is over the lap
of the punishing one, the Venus trap,
I watch, and thrust my narrow hairy
rear into a flower at the rhythm the big one is
onward-Christian-soldiering and
marching-off-to-warring—as she’s smoting,
I’m laying my eggs in the manure of a rose,
pumping to the beat. And my looking is a looking
primed, it is a looking to the power of itself,
and I see a sea folding inward,
200 little seas folding on themselves—
a mess of gene pool crushing down onto
its own shore. Then I turn back
to washing my hands of the chaff that flees off the
threshed onto the threshing floor.
Ho hum, I say, I’m just a flay—
fly light, fly bright, pieces of a species dashed
off onto a wall, chaff of wonder,
chaff of night.
Cobb: it’s akin to Icelandic
kobbi,
seal, and my father could float and fall
asleep on the water, and drift, steady
as a
male swan.
Dip down below gender, it’s
a lump or piece of anything, as of
coal, ore, or stone
—not ashes
but a clod—
usually of a large size
but not too large to be handled by one person
—as at
times, in my life, I have been a dazzled
rounded heap or mass of something
being
glistened almost out of existence.
A cobnut
was the boys’, and
a testicle,
but not
the stone
of a fruit—especially a drupaceous fruit—
or a peapod, or a small stack
of grain or hay, or a bunch of hair,
as a chignon—or a small loaf
of bread, a kind of muffin, a baked apple
dumpling!
Oh father me, tuck me in.
I’ll be the
stocky horse, one having an
artificially high stylish action,
and gladly be the pabulum,
the
string of crystals of sugar of milk,
C
12
H
22
O
11
,
separable from the whey, dextra-
rotatory,
as one might search
through matter for matter one could like being made of.
A mixture consisting of unburned clay,
usually with straw as a binder,
for constructing walls of small buildings,
or matter leaping up like spirit,
a black-backed gull,
or the eight-legged Jesus,
the
spider
—dear Dad, I search for how
to be your daughter, and I find the
wicker
basket
you liked to say you had carried me
around in. And now I want to cob your name
(to strike, to thump, specifically
to beat on the buttocks, as with a strap
or flat stick),
O
young herring,
O
head of a herring.
Dear old awful herring,
let’s go back through
covetous
to
thresh out seed,
let’s go back
to
ore dressing,
to
break into pieces,
break off the waste and low-grade materials
—
it is sweet
to throw, especially gently
or carelessly, to toss,
as if
your carelessness had been some newfangled
gentleness. Your spirit lies in my
spirit this morning
crosswise, as timbers
or logs in cobwork construction,
as we
make
or mend, coarsely,
as I
patch
or
botch
these
cobbl’d
rhymes.