The Dead and the Living

Sharon Olds

Cover

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

Title Page

Copyright

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

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.

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

Dedication

For George and Mary Oppen

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 after 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

under their bed the trap-door to the

cellar, with its barrels of fresh apples, and

somewhere in me too is the path

down to the creek gleaming in the dark, a

way out of there.

Birthday Poem for My Grandmother

(for L.B.M.C., 1890–1975)

I stood on the porch tonight— which way do we

face to talk to the dead? I thought of the

new rose, and went out over the

grey lawn— things really

have no color at night. I descended

the stone steps, as if to the place where one

speaks to the dead. The rose stood

half-uncurled, glowing white in the

black air. Later I remembered

your birthday. You would have been ninety and getting

roses from me. Are the dead there

if we do not speak to them? When I came to see you

you were always sitting quietly in the chair,

not knitting, because of the arthritis,

not reading, because of the blindness,

just sitting. I never knew how you

did it or what you were thinking. Now I

sometimes sit on the porch, waiting,

trying to feel you there like the color of the

flowers in the dark.

Of All the Dead That Have Come
to Me, This Once

I have never written against the dead. I would
open my

shirt to them and say yes, the white

cones still making sugary milk,

but when Grandfather’s gold pocketwatch

came in by air over the Rockies,

over the dark yellow of the fields

and the black rivers, with Grandmother’s blank

face pressed against his name in the back,

I thought of how he put the empty

plate in front of my sister, turned out

the lights after supper, sat in the black

room with the fire, the light of the flames

flashing in his glass eye

in that cabin where he taught my father

how to do what he did to me, and I said

No. I said Let this one be dead.

Let the fall he made through that glass roof,

splintering, turning, the great shanks and

slices of glass in the air, be his last

appearance here.

Farewell Poem

(for M. M. O., 1880–1974)

The big, cut iceberg waits

outside the harbor like a spaceship.

Sends in emissaries: cold

chopped fish, floating cakes,

canoes of ice white as brides.

Lurks just beyond the warm

furred lip of the harbor, summer

berries in the bushes, loud stink

of fish drying on salty wooden

slats. Waits. Hides nine

tenths of its iron implacable

bulk under the belt of the water,

frigid as cods’ teeth, even

now in July. The sea bathes

her endless pale scarred hips.

The berg sits, cute as a hat,

snowy as egret feathers, waiting

to call the next one out to the other

world beyond the absolutely

frozen vessel.

She walks down

to the water without her walker.

With none of her three canes she was always

losing, joking about, looking for,

finding over her arm. She just

had her hair done, silver curls

obedient as ivy tendrils

over her child’s brow. She wears

the grey dress with a white collar,

sensible shoes, white socks,

diamond pin, sets her foot

on the cloudy crystal of an ice floe

and floats out to her mother, floats

out to the white iceberg waiting

ninety-three years for hot death

to deliver his favorite daughter home to

the cool white long room,

lace curtains from the parlor flying

like flags in the summer sky.

The Winter After Your Death

(for Katie Sheldon Brennan)

The long bands of mellow light

across the snow

narrow slowly.

The sun closes her gold fan

and nothing is left but black and white—

the quick steam of my breath, the dead

accurate shapes of the weeds, still, as if

pressed in an album.

Deep in my body my green heart

turns, and thinks of you. Deep in the

pond, under the thick trap

door of ice, the water moves,

the carp hangs like a sun, its scarlet

heart visible in its side.

Miscarriage

When I was a month pregnant, the great

clots of blood appeared in the pale

green swaying water of the toilet.

Dark red like black in the salty

translucent brine, like forms of life

appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut

shapes of fungi.

That was the only appearance made by that

child, the dark, scalloped shapes

falling slowly. A month later

our son was conceived, and I never went back

to mourn the one who came as far as the

sill with its information: that we could

botch something, you and I. All wrapped in

purple it floated away, like a messenger

put to death for bearing bad news.

The End

We decided to have the abortion, became

killers together. The period that came

changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple

who had been for life.

As we talked of it in bed, the crash

was not a surprise. We went to the window,

looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming

curved shears of glass as if we had

done it. Cops pulled the bodies out

bloody as births from the small, smoking

aperture of the door, laid them

on the hill, covered them with blankets that soaked

through. Blood

began to pour

down my legs into my slippers. I stood

where I was until they shot the bound

form into the black hole

of the ambulance and stood the other one

up, a bandage covering its head,

stained where the eyes had been.

The next morning I had to kneel

an hour on that floor, to clean up my blood,

rubbing with wet cloths at those dark

translucent spots, as one has to soak

a long time to deglaze the pan

when the feast is over.

Best Friends

(for Elizabeth Ewer, 1942–51)

The day my daughter turned ten, I thought of the

lank, glittering, greenish cap of your

gold hair. The last week of

your life, when I came each day after school,

I’d study the path to your front door,

the bricks laid close as your hairs. I’d try to

read the pattern, frowning down

for a sign.

The last day—there was not

a mark on that walk, not a stone out of place—

the nurses would not let me in.

We were nine. We had never mentioned death

or growing up. I had no more imagined

you dead

than you imagined me

a mother. But when I had a daughter

I named her for you, as if pulling you back

through a crack between the bricks.

She is ten now, Liddy.

She has outlived you, her dark hair gleaming like

the earth into which the path was pressed,

the path to you.

Absent One

(for Muriel Rukeyser)

People keep seeing you and telling me

how white you are, how thin you are.

I have not seen you for a year, but slowly you are

forming above my head, white as

petals, white as milk, the dark

narrow stems of your ankles and wrists,

until you are always with me, a flowering

branch suspended over my life.

Part Two

Poems for the Living

I. The Family

Possessed

(for my parents)

I have never left. Your bodies are before me

at all times, in the dark I see

the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns

wheeling over my bed, and the darkness

is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads

over my crib, your body-hairs

which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows,

one by one. And I never leave your sight,

I can look in the eyes of any stranger and

find you there, in the rich swimming

bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the

blue that reflects from the knife’s blade,

and I smell you always, the dead cigars and

Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming,

the slow stopped bear tread and the

quick fox, her nails on the ice,

and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the

coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts

opening like jaws, drops from your glands

clinging to my walls like pearls in the night.

You think I left—I was the child

who got away, thousands of miles,

but not a day goes past that I am not

turning someone into you.

Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I

turn now, in the fear of this moment,

into your soft stained paw

resting on her breast, into your breast trying to

creep away from under his palm—

your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,

your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.

The Victims

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and

took it, in silence, all those years and then

kicked you out, suddenly, and her

kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we

grinned inside, the way people grinned when

Nixon’s helicopter lifted off the South

Lawn for the last time. We were tickled

to think of your office taken away,

your secretaries taken away,

your lunches with three double bourbons,

your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your

suits back, too, those dark

carcasses hung in your closet, and the black

noses of your shoes with their large pores?

She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it

until we pricked with her for your

annihilation, Father. Now I

pass the bums in doorways, the white

slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their

suits of compressed silt, the stained

flippers of their hands, the underwater

fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the

lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and

took it from them in silence until they had

given it all away and had nothing

left but this.

The Forms

I always had the feeling my mother would

die for us, jump into a fire

to pull us out, her hair burning like

a halo, jump into water, her white

body going down and turning slowly,

the astronaut whose hose is cut

falling
into
blackness. She would have

covered us with her body, thrust her

breasts between our chests and the knife,

slipped us into her coat pocket

outside the showers. In disaster, an animal

mother, she would have died for us,

but in life as it was

she had to put herself

first.

She had to do whatever he

told her to do to the children, she had to

protect herself. In war, she would have

died for us, I tell you she would,

and I know: I am a student of war,

of gas ovens, smothering, knives,

drowning, burning, all the forms

in which I have experienced her love.

The Departure

(to my father)

Did you weep like the Shah when you left? Did you forget

the way you had had me tied to a chair, as

he forgot the ones strapped to the grille

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