I THINK EMILY DICKINSON
WOULD HAVE BEEN POLITICAL TODAY
by Sharon Olds
Page 10
I keep thinking about Emily and women, Emily and her mother, Emily as a mother of us all. So I wanted to start with a poem that goes back to that. A poem called "The First Two Weeks":
When I wonder about myself,
I remember the first two weeks of my life, how I was drenched
with happiness. Birth was easy. The wall opened
like liquid, I felt it part as my scalp slid through, my head, I
pushed off, from the side, and sailed
gently, turned, squeezed out
neatly into the cold bright
air and breathed it. Clean, wrapped,
I slept, and when I woke there was the breast
the size of my head, hard and sweet,
the springy brachs of the nipple. Sleep.
Milk. Heat. Two weeks of milk and sleep. Once a day
she held me up to the window and wagged
my fist at my sister, down in the street, who
waved her cone back at me so
hard the ice cream flew through the air like a
butter-brickle cannonball,
but otherwise it was fire and silk, sleep and milk,
by day my mother's, and by night the nurses
in the feeding station would prop me with a bottle. Paradise
had its laws, too--every four hours and not
a minute sooner I could drink, but every four
hours I could have all I wanted, the world in my mouth.
Solar orbit of my soft palate, little earths of the tongue hurling within me.
Two weeks to let the mother heal,
and then home, to the maid's room down at the end of the long hall,
far from my mother,
where at night the nanny gave me four ounces of
water every four hours and in the meantime I screamed for it.
They knew it would build my character,
two weeks old, to learn to give up, and I learned it--dawn
and the streaked, satiny planet of the breast, the burp, the boiled
sheet to be placed on where my sister couldn't touch me,
I lay and moved my legs and arms like
little feelers in the light. Glorious life!
And it would always be there, back behind those nights
of screaming and tap water, all the way back,
I would always have it,
that two weeks of enough milk,
every four hours--hot little clock of sweet cream
and flame, I have known heaven.
