One Secret Thing

Sharon Olds completes her cycle of family poems in a book at once intense and harmonic, playful with language, and rich with a new self-awareness and sense of irony. The opening poem, with its sequence of fearsome images of war, serves as a prelude to poems of home in which humor, anger, and compassion sing together with lyric energysometimes comic, sometimes filled with a kind of unblinking forgiveness. These songs of joy and dangerpublic and privateilluminate one another. As the book unfolds, the portrait of the mother goes through a moving revisioning, leading us to a final series of elegies of hard-won mourning.One Secret Thingis charged throughout with Sharon Olds's characteristic passion, imagination, and poetic power. The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his first rotation in the emergency room. On the ancient boarding-school radio, in the attic hall, the announcer had given my boyfriend's name as one of two brought to the hospital after the sunrise service, the egg-hunt, the crashone of them critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the stairwell banisters, at their lathing, the necks and knobs like joints and bones, the varnish here thicker here thinnerI had said Which one of them died,and now the world was an ant's world: the huge crumb of each second thrown, somehow, up onto my back, and the young, tired voice said my fresh love's name. from"Easter 1960"

Diagnosis

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.



When Our Firstborn Slept In

My breasts hardening with milk—little seeps
leaking into the folded husband
hankies set into the front curves
of the nursing harness—I would wander around
the quiet apartment when her nap would last a little
longer than usual. When she was awake, I was
purpose, I was a soft domestic
prowling of goodness—only when she slept
was I free to think the thoughts of one
in bondage. I had wanted to be someone—not just
someone’s mom, but someone, some one.
Yet I know that this work that I did with her
lay at the heart of what mattered to me—was
that heart. And still there was a part of me
left out by it, as if exposed on a mountain
by mothering. And when she slept in,
I smelled the husks of olive rind
on that slope, I heard the blue knock
of the eucalyptus locket nut, I
tasted the breath of the wolf seeking
the flesh to enrich her milk, I saw the
bending of the cedar under the sea
of the wind—while she slept, it was as if
my pierced ankles loosed themselves
and I walked like a hunter in the horror-joy
of the unattached. Girl of a mother,
mother of a girl, I paced, listening,
almost part-fearing, sometimes, that she might have stopped
breathing, knowing nothing was anything, for me,
next to the small motions as she woke,
light and wind on the face of the water.
And then that faint cry, like a
pelagic bird, who sleeps in flight, and I would
turn, pivot on a spice-crushing heel,
and approach her door.



Calvinist Parents

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.


One Secret Thing

One secret thing happened
at the end of my mother’s life, when I was
alone with her. I knew it should happen—
I knew someone was there, in there,
something less unlike my mother than
anything else on earth. And the jar
was there on the table, the space around it
pulled back from it, like the awestruck handmade
air around the crèche, and her open
mouth was parched. It was late. The lid
eased off. I watched my finger draw through
the jelly, its egg-sex essence, the four
corners of the room were not creatures, were not
the four winds of the earth, if I did not
do this, what was I—I rubbed the cowlick of
petrolatum on the skin around where the
final measures of what was almost not
breath swayed, and her throat made a guttural
creek bed sound, like pebbly relief. But each
lip was stuck by chap to its row
of teeth, stuck fast. And then I worked
for my motherhood, my humanhood, I
slid my forefinger slowly back and
forth, along the scab-line and underlying
canines and incisors, upper lip and then
lower lip, until, like a basted
seam, softly ripped, what had been
joined was asunder, I ran the salve inside
the folds, along the gums,
common mercy. The secret was
how deeply I did not want to touch
inside her, and how much the act
was an act of escape, my last chance
to free myself.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from One Secret Thing by Sharon Olds
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