Balladz
Also by Sharon Olds
Arias
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 © 2022 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: Balladz / Sharon Olds.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022001788 (print) | LCCN 2022001789 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525656951 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524711610 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525656968 (ebook) Subjects: LCGFT: Poetry. Classification: LCC PS3565.L34 B35 2022 (print) | LCC PS3565.L34 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001788 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001789
Ebook ISBN 9780525656968
Cover art by Sam Messer
ep_prh_6.0_141463709_c0_r0
for Brenda Hillman and for Robert Hass
Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Quarantine
Quarantine Morning
May 14, 2020
My Hand
Quarantine
8 Steps of 2 Steps Down
After
Anatomy Lesson for the Officer
My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together
Centipede
Yes
Quarantine Argiope
Not Once
Meditation During the Sufferings and Deaths of Others
Before the Electric Traps Arrived
Isolation Liverwurst
Quarantine Fast
Narcissus Takes Another Look at Household Tasks
Monday, November 2, 2020
Quarantine Puzzle
Narcissus in Quarantine
339th Morning of My Easy Quarantine
X-Ray & Rats
New Year’s Song
Sprung Trap
Spotted Aria
When I Looked Out
A Song Near the End of the World
2 Amherst Balladz
1 “Let us Play -Yesterday -”
2 “You did not Sell -the Blueing -”
3 “I Did not Shave -to Visit your Town -”
4 “I Slept -in your Town -behind a Door”
5 “In one Double-Glaze Pane -”
6 “The air -was Close -the Pane -slid High -”
7 “Outside your Room -in the Wain’s Coat -”
8 “At the center of your Room -”
9 “No Jack I -Nor killed a Joint -”
10 “When I came to Emily’s -House -late -”
3 Balladz
Best Friend Ballad
Ballad of the Chair
Grandmother, with Parakeet
Paper Doll Ballad, for Fats
Crazy Sharon Talks to the Bishop
Ballad of Once Mike Carter
Cuckoo Ballad
Joined Ballad
Snap Pants Off Like
Spectrum Ballad
Ballad of the Blossoming Branch
Ballad of EIGHMIWAY
Subway Ballad
Dear Stanley,
Ballad Torn Apart
Geraldine Dodge Ballad
Ms. Turbation
Not Extinct Yet
Hair Ballad
Rubber Shower Mat Ballad
Handkerchief Ballad
Epidermis Ballad
4 Album from a Previous Existence
Part One
If I Had Been Able
Genesis
My Mother’s Meat Grinder
Her Portrait
Bad & Crazy
When They Told Me God Could Read My Mind,
Tender Bitter
In Praise of the Tear Glands
Goodbye
What Came Next After Our Father’s Death
Part Two
Ghazal Confessional
White Boy in Pajamas, Big Sur Inn, Gulf War
The Communicant
Bianca Helps Me Clean My Attic
5 o’Clockface
Improv
If I Were to Sing Myself,
Into Tahoe
this is just to say
To Chase, After the Diagnosis
To Chase, During Her Surgery
All of a Sudden, I See, and My Heart Sinks
What I Look Like
Dream Near the End
5 Elegies
Part One
Transformations
Her Brother
Confessional (for S.B.)
That Goddess
Wasn’t Afraid Of
Looking for Galway on the Vermont Mountainside
Suddenly
After Reading Shallcross
Part Two
When They Say You Have Maybe Three Months Left
Heroin
When the Cancer Has Come Back, Sleeping in His House with Him but Not in His Bed with Him
His Birthday
His Voice, a Week Before His Spirit Follows His Voice Out
Three Views of Him Asleep, His Final Days
The Preparing
The Box
After an Epitaph on an English Headstone
Can’t Sleep
Komodo
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank the following publications in which a number of these poems previously appeared, sometimes in slightly different form.
“A Song Near the End of the World”: The New Yorker
“My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together”: London Review of Books
“Anatomy Lesson for the Officer”: Iterant
“Not Once”: Poem-a-Day: The Poetry Foundation
“Meditation During the Sufferings and Deaths of Others”: Prairie Schooner
“Quarantine Morning”: The Paris Review
“339th Morning of My Easy Quarantine”: Iterant
“X-Ray & Rats”: Prairie Schooner
“Sprung Trap”: Iterant
“Amherst Ballad 1”: Hunger Mountain
“Amherst Ballad 2”: The Southern Review
“Amherst Ballad 6”: Gulf Coast
“Amherst Ballad 8”: The Night Heron Barks
“Amherst Ballad 10”: Prairie Schooner
“Best Friend Ballad”: The Threepenny Review
“Paper Doll Ballad, for Fats”: A Gathering of the Tribes
“Crazy Sharon Talks to the Bishop”: The American Poetry Review
“Ballad of Once Mike Carter”: Prairie Schooner
“Spectrum Ballad”: Hunger Mountain
“Genesis”: Narrative
“Bad & Crazy”: Prairie Schooner
“Ghazal Confessional”: Gulf Coast
“5 o’Clockface”: The Threepenny Review
“Transformations”: The Southern Review
“Her Brother”: The American Poetry Review
“Wasn’t Afraid Of”: Harvard Review
“When They Say You Have Maybe Three Months Left”: The American Poetry Review
“Heroin”: The Southern Review
“Three Views of Him Asleep, His Final Days”: Gulf Coast
“The Preparing”: Narrative
“After an Epitaph on an English Headstone”: The Southern Review
1
Quarantine
Quarantine Morning
Climbing the stairs, slowly, on my palms
and soles, bent far forward, I see
my shins closer than usual—
their indigo and red-violet fireworks,
their royal blue wormholes—
how much difference is there, anymore,
between me and a cadaver?
I know I won’t come, after I’m dead,
though it does seem a little strange, to me,
and strange that what we learned in Seventh Grade Health
is not a structural part of each of us like heart-beat and breath,
though sometimes people die of a heart-attack in bed.
I think my mother’s father did, with his mistress,
then they said to his wife he had fallen down the cellar
stairs that weren’t there. I told my son that,
in his late forties, when he said I never
told him anything about my family—
and he said, What did they do then, throw him down the cellar
stairs?
This morning, in a dream, his father came into a restaurant, I was
waiting on the banquette
and I saw him at a distance, taller than everyone,
and with that light in the air around his face
I had seen, sometimes, when I’d arrived late to meet him.
It was not his whiteness—I had seen it around my boyfriend’s face
in high school.
With Joey I thought it was genius, inspiration almost like possession,
and I think it was,
with my ex I thought it was goodness but I think it was sexual liking
and the illusion his tolerance for me would be lifelong.
I don’t remember the last time we made love before I moved into the
living room when I understood he was really going to leave me.
I didn’t know it was the last time,
but it was like all the other times, complete, and wrenching,
though I think I said, after the series of orgasms, One more? and
did he kiss me,
or smile, or grunt,
and I came again, although I was dead.
May 14, 2020
I lay a curse on every person of no
color who had kneeled on the throat of a person
of color. Figural or literal—
this is no
Mother May I,
I have no mother, I am the mother,
I am a white mother, laying
her curse. We’re on the way out—if our species
lasts long enough, there will be no one of no
color. Meanwhile I curse us, for our murderous
ignorance. I have not cursed
anyone before, not my mother when she was
knapping the little knobs and tabs of my
soul off me, nor my father when he was
harming my sister. But I curse them now,
as white criminals, and I curse myself
with them. May we eat the knowledge
of suffering, may we eat the bitter
waste of the false food we have fed
others. May we eat it in pain, and in time.
My Hand
When I look at my hand, and at the back of my wrist,
gleaming with the petrolatum which I’ve
rubbed into its chap—mineral oil,
ceresin, lanolin, panthenol, glycerin,
bisabolol, I see the fine
wrinkles, many making diamond shapes,
some of them long cicatrice wobbles—
it looks touching to me, and lucky. And I like
the veins which bulge up from the back of my hand.
I’m a member of a couple. My partner is in
a linen shift, a pine box,
a New Hampshire earth—sacred in the Jewish
cemetery. I say to you, Carl,
my darling, it’s O.K. your tissue
will melt with the dirt when spring comes,
it’s O.K. you cannot change the shock-
shape of your body I love, you are innocent
of death, you are good.
We are a couple. Remember when I climbed into your narrow
hospice bed, when you could hardly move,
and as soon as I fitted myself in
along you, like the last piece of a puzzle,
we both passed out into sleep. When I drove north,
out of a city of plague, my car—
your car which you sold me for the list price—
was packed with notebooks in which our stories
are held, balanced in their slow dance
up and down and up. My epidermis
looks pretty, to me, tonight, frail
and real, like rills in sand which water
rippled. I liked to talk with you about the
golden crown the internet rabbi
said you would be wearing, after death,
at the feast. And I love, now, seeing
in the web of my glistening wrist-skin that I am
already part with thee, tender and
permanent is the night.
Quarantine
When I left the city for the house in the woods,
slowly I got to know the room where I sat
on the bed all day and looked through its arabesque foot
at the fireplace under the beveled mantel
where the oval mirror was balanced vertical,
and sometimes a brass ball cast a bent
spear of sun
onto the glass which
bounced a brilliant fish-hook onto
the ceiling. Outside the window, the worn
plastic siloes of black oil seed
dangled like the bars of a score, the songbirds in a
darting frenzy around them.
Elsewhere, people sicken and die.
Elsewhere, people starve, and thirst,
and hide by dawn, and walk by evening,
and perish, and their parents perish.
I try to hide from knowing that.
I send money, I send for a cotton
dress, for the hot weather,
for the eating and drinking and writing, describing
the luxuries of my vantage point
in plenty and safety. I do not give
enough—and my taxes are spent, by the orange
cockatoo, in the White Man House,
on bailing out bankers. O.K., spend
the rest of the day sending money
to the hungry—pay back a tithe of what
generations of my family stole.
I am of a people of thieves,
and beaters of children. I was not beaten
because of my race, but because I belonged
to my mother, and I was a girl, and a child,
and obedient—I mean sane—I never
thought of saying no to her
until I was a head taller than my mother.
And I did not deserve to be beaten, but now
I see it—I have not ever, in my life,
been beaten outside my gender, or my family, or my color.
8 Steps of 2 Steps Down
First there was a sudden rattle.
Then, loud clattering and crunching.
It seemed to be coming from below me, I went
to the top of the basement stairs and turned on the
light and turned my big feet to the
side and walked down the narrow steps
between the steep risers, and over to the tame
infernal furnace. Somewhere inside it there were
snaps and crackles and pops like the elves with
our initials on the cereal box—we born
of plenty, and ignorant of the fact.
In the morning the oil man came in his truck,
and we put on our masks and bowed to each other
in a feudal dance, and he descended. When he left,
he said a mouse had gone into the fan. Now I
know what it sounds like when someone enters the system.
After
After the quarter-ton bear walks past me,
left to right, six feet away,
I notice that now I start breathing heavily
halfway up my dozen stairs—then I
lie on the bed and pant for a while.
And the tremor is worse, so that, when I’m cooking, I am
literally throwing a few ingredients together,
salt and sugar and raw rice on the floor around my feet.
My equipment for staying alive is wearing out,
my screen when I close it leaks bone-gel on the keys,
and the skin of my forearms hangs down in watered-silk rivulets.
I think I had thought I might be spared the extreme of dying.
On one of his last nights, my darling began caroling,
mad songs, as his brain was going—wild and terrible
but funny, too, I think I thought I might
live for 100 more years to describe those solos.
And Galway—maybe I would go on and on singing him since he no
longer could.
But when I saw, in the last portrait, Willy’s eyebrow
still cocked as if hunting, attentive to something at a distance,
one canine curved, a milk-thorn in his mouth,
and the bedlinen his body was wrapped in tied at the waist in a
powerful knot,
Willy’s head emerging as a curly off-white harvest bouquet.
My mouth warbled and my eyes poured
as if from the watercolor of the blue pitcher resting on his
winding-sheet
with the blue Thank You—Willy in his cloud
setting into the mountain.
Someday I will run out of tears—
they are honored now to be shedding for Willy and Bwindi,
and Galway and Charlie. And maybe, if I’m lucky,
Bobbie and Catherine might bundle me up for my wash-day,
wrap me in swaddling clothes and lay me
in the manger of the earth, with Carl, and Hazel.
Anatomy Lesson for the Officer
That is your head. That is your heart.
Elbow, bicep, knee, thigh.
And the valve in back of you, your behind,
I think it may be a genital part which
holds your genital part from in front.
I am not saying Go f. yourself.
You have done that. You have f’d our species.
I am saying, That is your holster, your gun,
your handcuffs. And those are his hands in your cuffs.
And that is a human throat you are kneeling
on. That is our throat, our brother’s,
our son’s, maybe our father’s throat.
That is your mother’s, your father’s, your son’s,
your daughter’s throat. That is your daughter’s throat.
My Head and My Mother’s Breast in Quarantine Together
After nine months safe and well
in a room alone, I was sitting facing