I THINK EMILY DICKINSON
WOULD HAVE BEEN POLITICAL TODAY
by Sharon Olds
Page 15
I'll read two more poems. I usually try to go sad--funny--sad--funny. But some of my funny ones are so questionable in taste. Oh, I know one that isn't. But I don't have it up here with me. Well, I'll turn them around. I'll read the happier one first. I'll read two more. "May 1968":
The Dean of the University said the neighborhood people could not cross campus
until the students gave up the buildings,
so we lay down, in the street,
we said the cops will enter this gate
over our bodies. Spine down on the cobbles
hard bed like a carton of eggs,
I saw the buildings of New York City
from dirt level, they soared up
and stopped, as if chopped off cleanly--beyond them, the sky,
dark and neither sour nor sweet,
the night air over the island.
The mounted police moved, near us,
delicately. Flat out on our backs, we sang, and then I began to count,
12, 13, 14, 15,
I counted again, 15, 16, one
month since the day on that deserted beach,
when we used nothing, 17, 18, my mouth fell open,
my hair in the soil,
if my period did not come tonight
I was pregnant. I looked up at the sole of a
cop's shoe, I looked up at the horse's belly, its genitals--
if they took me to Women's Detention and did
the exam on me, jammed the unwashed speculum
high inside me, the guard's three fingers--I lay on Broadway.
I looked up into the horse's tail
like a dark-filthed comet. All week, I had
wanted to get arrested, longed
to give myself away. I lay in the tar--
one brain in my head, and another tiny brain, at the base of my tail--
And I stared at the world.
Good luck iron arc of the gelding's
shoe, the man's
baton, the deep curve of the animal's belly, the buildings streaming up
away from the earth. I gazed at it with my mouth open
as if I had never seen it before. I knew I should get up
and leave, stand up to muzzle level,
to the height of the soft, velvet nostrils and walk away,
turn my back on my friends and danger.
But I was a coward, so I lay there looking up at the sky,
black vault arched above us, I lay there gazing up
at God, at his underbelly, until it turned deep blue and then
silvery, colorless, Give me this one
night, I said, and I'll give this child
the rest of my life, the horses' heads,
drooping, dipping, until they slept in a dark circle about my body and my daughter.
And I want to close with this for Emily, for Muriel, for all of us. "My Father's Ashes":
The urn was so heavy, small but so heavy,
I could hardly lift it like the time, weeks before he died,
when he needed to pee, and I helped to lift him. Got my shoulder
under his armpit, my cheek along his
naked freckled warm back
while she fumbled in front with the urinal --he had
lost half his body weight
and yet he was so heavy we could hardly hold him up
till he got the fluid out crackling and
sputtering like a gold fire. The smooth, stainless urn
had that same kind of final heaviness, it warmed
slowly to my touch as I stood rubbing it under
the blue fir tree, stroking it
as I had stroked his skin after he died, in firm, steady circles.
Near us, the shovel got the last dirt
out of the grave--it must have made that
kind of gritty iron noise when they
scraped his ashes out of the grate--
the others would be here any minute and I
wanted to open the urn as if then
I would finally know him. On the wet lawn,
under the trees with their small cones sealed in a heavy cloak of rosin, I
tore my nails trying to open
the thin, recessed, central top like his Humidor lid.
I clawed at it, like someone trying to escape
from a stone cell with their bare hands, and
then it gave and slipped off easily and
there it was, the actual matter of this earth:
small, speckled balls of bone
like tiny eggs; a darkened bent curl of bone like a
black fungus arching to fit the curve of a branch;
spotted pebbles--and the spots were the channels of his marrow
where the living orbs of the molecules
swam powerfully as if by their own strong will
and in each cell the chromosomes
tensed and flashed, tore themselves
away from themselves like lovers, leaving their shining
duplicates. I looked at the jumble
of shards like a crushed hive: the mass of broken order.
was that the bone of his wrist, was that
from the large elegant knee
he had bent in the sun and flexed in the water,
over and over, was that
his jaw, his skull that at birth was
flexible yet-I stood and loved him,
bone and the ash it lay in, silvery
white as the shimmering coils of dust
the earth leaves behind as it rolls, you can
hear its heavy roaring as it rolls away.
