One Secret Thing

Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980–2002

The Unswept Room

Blood, Tin, Straw

The Wellspring

The Father

The Gold Cell

The Dead and the Living

Satan Says

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2008 by Sharon Olds

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Olds, Sharon.
  One secret thing / by Sharon Olds.—1st ed.
      p. cm.
  eISBN: 978-0-307-80437-2
  I. Title.
PS
3565.l34
O
54 2008
811′.54—dc22

2008019607

v3.1

A Note About the Author

The American Poetry Review
: “Money,” “Maiden Name,”
“Paterfamilias,” “When Our Firstborn Slept In,” “The Scare,”
“Pansy Coda,” “The Music,” “Two Late Dialogues,” “Little End Ode,” “Last Hour,” “Mom as Comet”

Antioch Review
: “Free Shoes”

Brick
: “The Float”

Five Points
: “Behavior Chart,” “Good Measure”

Massachusetts Review
: “The Body”

The Missouri Review
: “What Could Happen”

Ms.
: “One Secret Thing”

The New England Review
: “The Leader”

The New Yorker
: “Easter 1960,” “The Space Heater,” “Self-Exam,” “The Last Evening,” “Her Creed”

The Paris Review
: “Calvinist Parents”

Ploughshares
: “The Couldn’t”

Poetry
: “Legless Fighter Pilot,” “When He Came for the Family,” “The Signal,” “Home Ec,” “Still Life”

Poetry London
: “Animal Dress,” “Satin Maroon”

Tin House
: “At Night”

Tri-Quarterly
: “Western Wind”

Most of us are never conceived.

Many of us are never born—

we live in a private ocean for hours,

weeks, with our extra or missing limbs,

or holding our poor second head,

growing from our chest, in our arms. And many of us,

sea-fruit on its stem, dreaming kelp

and whelk, are culled in our early months.

And some who are born live only for minutes,

others for two, or for three, summers,

or four, and when they go, everything

goes—the earth, the firmament—

and love stays, where nothing is, and seeks.

They are crowded in a line being shoved toward a truck.

Some seem stunned, some sick with fear.

She stands slightly outside the line,

black hat clamped on her head,

mouth compressed. In her hands she holds

an oversized lettuce, its white stems and

great, pale, veined leaves

unfolded in the dense air. She stares

directly at the camera, the large, delicate

plant in her grip, its glowing vanes

reaching out. Furious, she takes her

last chance to look right at us.

He takes his right calf in his hand,

lifts the whole leg up, straight,

turns, and swings it into the cockpit,

sliding into the seat. The left leg he

bends by hand at the knee, pulls it in, and

slams the hatch, then in his aircraft

he rises over the hills. In the sky

no one can walk, everyone

is a sitting duck, he banks and begins to hunt.

He is not afraid of anything now,

not even his coffin—hell, he is part

native oak already, and if he

lost his arms he’d replace them. All he

wants is to bag as many as he can,

crash them into the ground like birds into a sack with their

useless legs trailing out the mouth of it.

When the men and women went into hiding,

they knew what could happen if the others caught them.

They knew their bodies might be undone,

their sexual organs taken as if

to destroy the mold so the human could not

be made anymore. They knew what the others

went for—the center of the body,

and not just for the agony and horror but to

send them crudely barren into death,

throwing those bodies down in the village at dawn

to show that all was ended. But each

time the others dumped a body in the square,

a few more people took to the woods,

as if springing up, there,

from the loam dark as the body’s wound.

The ground was frozen, the coffin-wood burned

for fuel. So the dead were covered with something

and taken on a child’s sled to the cemetery

in the subzero air. They lay on the snow,

some wrapped in rough cloth

bound with rope, like the tree’s ball of roots

when it waits to be planted; others wound

in sheets, their gauze, tapered shapes

stiff as cocoons which will split down the center

when the new life inside is prepared;

but most lay like corpses, their coverings

coming loose, naked calves

hard as corded wood spilling

from under a tarp, a hand reaching out

as if to the bread made of glue and sawdust,

to the icy winter, and the siege.

They looked at their daughter standing with her music

in her hand, the page covered with dots and

lines, with its shared language. They knew

families had been taken. What they did not know

was the way he would pick her cello up

by the scroll neck and take its amber

torso-shape and lift it and break it

against the fireplace. The brickwork crushed the

close-grained satiny wood, they stood and

stared at him.

When they brought his body back, they told

his wife how he’d died:

the general thought they had taken the beach,

and sent in his last reserves. In the smokescreen,

the boats moved toward shore. Her husband

was the first man in the first boat

to move through the smoke and see the sand

dark with bodies, the tanks burning,

the guns thrown down, the landing craft

wrecked and floored with blood. In the path of the

bullets and shells from the shore, her husband had

put on a pair of white gloves

and turned his back on the enemy,

motioning to the boats behind him

to turn back. After everyone else

on his boat was dead

he continued to signal, then he, too,

was killed, but the other boats had seen him

and turned back. They gave his wife the medal,

and she buried him, and at night floated through

a wall of smoke, and saw him at a distance

standing in a boat, facing her,

the gloves blazing on his hands as he motioned her back.

Seeing the wind at the airport blowing on his hair,

lifting it up where it was slicked down, you

want to say to the wind, Stop, that’s

the leader’s hair, but the wind keeps lifting it

and separating the thin strands and

fanning it out like a weed-head in the air.

His brows look bright in the airport glare,

his eyes are crinkled up against the sun, you

want to say to his eyes, Stop, you are

the leader’s eyes, close yourselves, but they are

on his side, no part of his body

can turn against him. His thumbnail is long and

curved—it will not slit his throat for the

sake of the million children; his feet in their

polished shoes won’t walk him into the

propeller and end the war. His heart won’t

cease to beat, even if it knows

whose heart it is—it has no loyalty to

other hearts, it has no future outside his body.

And you can’t suddenly tell his mind that it is

his mind, get out while it can,

it already knows that it’s his mind—

much of its space is occupied with the

plans for the marble memorial statues

when he dies of old age. They’ll place one

in every capital city of his nation

around the world—Lagos, Beijing,

São Paolo, New York, London, Baghdad,

Sydney, Paris, Jerusalem,

a giant statue of him, Friend to the Children

of the leader’s country—

which will mean all children, then,

all those living.