Sharon Olds

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out, my mother potters around her house. Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one there, no one to tell what to do, she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself, fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly throws out her arms and screams—high notes lying here and there on the carpets like bodies touched by a downed wire, she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she. I feel, now, that I do not know her, and for all my staring, I have not seen her —like the song she sang, when we were small, I wonder as I wander, out under the sky, how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die, for poor lonely people, like you, and like I

what about those nosegays?! If you were to return I would give you more, for all you have given us, for your going first. Those posies might have a peony, a freesia, a tulip — an eye snack and nostril snack, I could not get enough of giving you coronation bundles, handing them and almost bowing, tongue-tied with respectful adoring, with gobbling the sight of you the sound, the bouquets saying mother- — we would not be here, without your song, your eye.

In the back of the charm-box, in a sack, the baby canines and incisors are mostly chaff, by now, split kernels and acicular down, no whole utensils left: half an adz; half a shovel, in its broken handle a marrow well of the will to dig and bite. And the enamel hems are sharp as shell-tools, and the colors go from salt, to bone, to pee on snow, to sun on pond-ice embedded with twigs and chipped-off skate-blade. One cuspid is like the tail of an ivory chough on my grandmother's what-not in a gravure on my mother's bureau in my father's house in my head, I think it's our daughter's, but the dime Hermes mingled the deciduals of our girl and boy, safe- keeping them together with the note that says Dear Toth Farry, Plees Giv Me A Bag of Moany

It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright, a woman was lying on the highway, on her back, with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders so the back of her head touched her spine between her shoulder-blades, her clothes mostly accidented off, and her leg gone, a long bone sticking out of the stub of her thigh— this was her her abandoned matter, my mother grabbed my head and turned it and clamped it into her chest, between her breasts. My father was driving—not sober but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of neutral twilight, broken glass on wet black macadam, like an underlying midnight abristle with stars. This was the world—maybe the only one. The dead woman was not the person my father had recently almost run over, who had suddenly leapt away from our family car, jerking back from death, she was not I, she was not my mother, but maybe she was a model of the mortal, the elements ranged around her on the tar— glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.

Spoon of O, spoon of nothing, spoon of ankh, spoon of poonss , spoon of the lady at the dressing table, spoon of , spoon of female, spoon of , spoon of war, spoon of the world, spoon of War of the Worlds, spoon of stick figure, spoon of girl, spoon of boy, spoon of spear thrower, spoon of fire, spoon of egg, spoon of egg race, spoon of dish, spoon of ran away with, spoon of ran away with and came back, spoon of never came back, spoon of silver, spoon of gold, spoon of milk, spoon of Saturn, spoon of vulva, spoon of vagina, spoon of Ant, spoon of Bee, spoon of Venus, spoon of Serena, spoon of vugg, spoon of vum, spoon of spider, spoon of sun, spoon of fee, fie, foe, fum. Spoon of everyone. Spoon of the belly. Spoon of the empty belly. Spoon of the full one. Spoon of no one hungry. Spoon for everyone.

I am locked in a little cedar box with a picture of shepherds pasted onto the central panel between carvings. The box stands on curved legs. It has a gold, heart-shaped lock and no key. I am trying to write my way out of the closed box redolent of cedar. Satan comes to me in the locked box and says,I’ll get you out. Say My father is a shit. I say my father is a shit and Satan laughs and says,It’s opening. Say your mother is a pimp. My mother is a pimp. Something opens and breaks when I say that. My spine uncurls in the cedar box like the pink back of the ballerina pin with a ruby eye, resting beside me on satin in the cedar box. Say shit, say death, say fuck the father, Satan says, down my ear. The pain of the locked past buzzes in the child’s box on her bureau, under the terrible round pond eye etched around with roses, where self-loathing gazed at sorrow. Shit. Death. Fuck the father. Something opens. Satan says Don’t you feel a lot better? Light seems to break on the delicate edelweiss pin, carved in two colors of wood. I love him too, you know, I say to Satan dark in the locked box. I love them but I’m trying to say what happened to us in the lost past.Of course, he says and smiles,of course. Now say: torture. I see, through blackness soaked in cedar, the edge of a large hinge open. Say: the father’s cock, the mother’s cunt, says Satan,I’ll get you out. The angle of the hinge widens until I see the outlines of the time before I was, when they were locked in the bed. When I say the magic words, Cock, Cunt, Satan softly says,Come out. But the air around the opening is heavy and thick as hot smoke. Come in, he says, and I feel his voice breathing from the opening. The exit is through Satan’s mouth. Come in my mouth, he says,you’re there already, and the huge hinge begins to close. Oh no, I loved them, too, I brace my body tight in the cedar house. Satan sucks himself out the keyhole. I’m left locked in the box, he seals the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue. It’s your coffin now, Satan says. I hardly hear; I am warming my cold hands at the dancer’s ruby eye— the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.

As the guests arrive at our son’s party they gather in the living room— short men, men in first grade with smooth jaws and chins. Hands in pockets, they stand around jostling, jockeying for place, small fights breaking out and calming. One says to another How old are you? —Six. —I’m seven. —So? They eye each other, seeing themselves tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their throats a lot, a room of small bankers, they fold their arms and frown.I could beat you up, a seven says to a six, the midnight cake, round and heavy as a turret behind them on the table. My son, freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks, chest narrow as the balsa keel of a model boat, long hands cool and thin as the day they guided him out of me, speaks up as a host for the sake of the group. We could easily kill a two-year-old, he says in his clear voice. The other men agree, they clear their throats like Generals, they relax and get down to playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

1. brett returns my mother to the wilderness I slipped them into my friend’s palm — the tiny crucifix, and dove, from off my mother’s pendant watch — and I asked her to walk them up through the brush toward timberline, and find a place to hurl them, for safekeeping. Now, she writes, “I walked up the canyon at dusk, warm, with a touch of fall blowing down the canyon, came to an outcrop, above a steep drop — far below, a seasonal creek, green willows. I stood on a boulder and held out my hand. I wished your mother all the love in the world, and I sent the talismans flying off the cliff. They were so small, and the wind was blowing, so I never saw or heard them land.” My mother is where I cannot find her, she is gone beyond recall, she lies in her sterling shapes light as the most weightless bone in the body, her stirrup bone, which was ground up and sown into the sea. I do not know what a soul is, I think of it as the smallest, the core, civil right. And she is wild now with it, she touches and is touched by no one knows — down, or droppings of a common nighthawk, root of bird’s foot fern, antenna of Hairstreak or Echo Azure, or stepped on by the huge translucent Jerusalem cricket. There was something deeply right about the physical elements — atoms, and cells, and marrow — of my mother’s body, when I was young, and now her delicate insignias receive the direct touch of the sun, and scatter it, unseen, all over her home. 2. cross and dove I had not wanted them, and I hadn’t known what to do with them, the minuscule symbols of my mother’s religion, I looked for a crack in the stone floor of the cathedral but could not find one. Then I thought of the wilderness near Desolation, and asked my friend to carry them up to a peak of granite, and let the wind take them. Since then, it has been as if my mother’s spirit matter has been returned into the great bank of matter, as her marrow had been sifted down into the ocean. It doesn’t matter, now, if I ever wanted to disassemble my mother. The sixteenth-of-an-inch- across cross, and the silver line drawing of a dove are cached, somewhere, that is nowhere to be found. Now I think of the nature of metal, and how long the soul-dolls of her trust will last in their spider-egg-sac of roots, needles, quartz, feathers, dust, snow, shed claw. Her belief she would have an eternal life was absolute, I think. It would not be good to think of my mother without her God — like a hermit howling in the moonscape of a desert. Once, when she was old — like an exquisite child playing a crone in the school play — we talked about heaven. She wasn’t sure exactly how, but she knew her father would be there, and her elder brother, and her second husband — maybe it was a heaven for four, the three men and her. It was so easy to make my mother happy in her last years, to tell her that I could just see her, as a kitten, in God’s lap, being petted. Her eyes sparkled with more beams than any other eyes I have seen. I have sent the tokens of her everlasting being into the high altitude. They will shine long after I can sing her — sing what I perceived through the distorted prisms of my vision. I don’t know if I saw my mother or did not see her. Day and night, her charms will gleam in the brush or stream, will reflect the mountain light in little pieces of unreadable language.

For Etan Patz The parents whose boy went off to school that morning — the police may have found someone who saw their son, alive, after they saw him for the last time.Step away! Someone who saw that elfin face change, at the word “soda.”Step back! And change again, and change. And down the basement steps, down into the earth, the stairs down into the underworld. Don’t go there. Close your eyes. Someone may know the unbearable — someone in custody. O, “custody.” A wall of dirt, a wall of stone, a bare bulb, like the uterus upside down. No Kaddish, no washing of the dead, no linen shroud, no company through the long night. Whatever honor can be kept for him — his pure and whole honor is kept by his parents, for the rest of the hard labor of their lives. All this time, they could not die, so they’d be here, in case he came back.Unspeakable. And now, the one taken in for questioning cries out, “I don’t know why, I don’t know why.” He will not tell. Is he holding that hour to himself. Did he hold that child in his hands, 39 years ago. Vanished. The spirit mattered away. And the dear matter —don’t. The bag, the truck. The landfill or the barge, the burial at sea — the dispersal, the containment within the bounds of the oceans, crested on top and cragged at the floor where the innards of the planet pour up, molten, through fissures — contained in the air bound by the atmosphere, the clouds of mourning pressing against the inner surface of the casing.Shut your mouth. Put down your pen. Drop your weapon! Stop! In the name of the law and the prophets.

As our daughter approaches graduation and puberty at the same time, at her own, calm, deliberate, serious rate, she begins to kick up her heels, jazz out her hands, thrust out her hipbones, chant I’m great! I’m great! She feels 8th grade coming open around her, a chrysalis cracking and letting her out, it falls behind her and joins the other husks on the ground, 7th grade, 6th grade, the magenta rind of 5th grade, the hard jacket of 4th when she had so much pain, 3rd grade, 2nd, the dim cocoon of 1st grade back there somewhere on the path, and kindergarten like a strip of thumb-suck blanket taken from the actual blanket they wrapped her in at birth. The whole school is coming off her shoulders like a cloak unclasped, and she dances forth in her jerky sexy child’s joke dance of self, self, her throat tight and a hard new song coming out of it, while her two dark eyes shine above her body like a good mother and a good father who look down and love everything their baby does, the way she lives their love.