One Secret Thing (2 page)

The man hunched on the ground, holding

the arm of the corpse, is smiling. And the man

bending over, stabbing the chest,

a look of pleasant exertion on his face,

is smiling. The man lying on the ground is

staring up, shirt splattered black

like splashes around a well where the bucket has been

dipped and dipped. They hold his wrists, as if

displaying his span, a large bird

slung from its heavy wing tips,

and the handsome young man goes on stabbing

and smiling, and the other sits on the ground

holding the dead arm like a leash, smiling.

The pairs of shoes stand in rows,

polished and jet, like coffins for small pets,

lined with off-white. Evacuated children

sit in rows eyeing the pairs,

child after child after child, no parents

anywhere near. When it’s their turn,

they get a pair of new shoes

and the old ones are taken away.

Of course it is kind of the nice people

to give them the shoes. Of course it is better

to be here in the country, not there where the buildings

explode and hurl down pieces of children.

Of course, of course. This life that has been

given them like a task! This life, this

black bright narrow unbroken-in shoe.

Eventually, they found the people

who could tell by the smell whether or not

someone was alive in the ruins. They would crouch,

move their heads above holes in the rubble,

and after a while they’d say Yes, there is something,

someone. They’d inhale some more,

lying flat on the planks, the odor

trickling up, into their brains, and

sometimes they’d say, It’s too late, here.

Other times the blood was still flowing and

then the large beams would be hoisted, the

pipes cut, the bricks lifted,

foot by foot they’d go down and the sniffer would

say, Keep going, someone’s there! They’d dig day and

night without sleep to see the eyelids

flutter, to smell the fresh, dissolved salt.

Burning, he kept the plane up

long enough for the crew to jump. He could

feel the thrust down, and the lift,

each time one of them leapt, full-term, the

parachutes unfolding and glistening, little

sacs of afterbirth. They drifted toward

what could be long lives, his fist

seared to the stick. When he’d felt all six

leave him, he put the nose down

and saw the earth coming up toward him,

green as a great basin of water

being lifted to his face.

The body lies, dropped down on the stones,

pieces of plastic and steel in it, it is

not breathing, it cannot make its

heart pump no matter how hard it tries.

It tries to move its left hand,

its left foot—its lips, tongue,

it cannot cry, it cannot feel,

the lovely one is gone, the one who

rode it, rider on a mount, the one who had

a name and spoke. It lies on the rocks in its

camouflage, canteen at its belt,

probably still holding water,

and it can’t do anything, it can’t even

get at the water, they will put it in a pit,

cover it over, it will never feel

that vivid one

wake in it.

When we’d visit it, down the street,

in the grammar school, I was so young

I sat on my mother’s forearm, and gazed at the

stainless retort where the cylinders

of tinned iron and sheet metal,

hermetically sealed, glided, at a slant,

like a column of soldered soldiers, single-

file, down along the slatted chrome

ramp from the flame-sterilizers

in the requisitioned lunchroom. The woman

who ran that home-front cannery was

shorter than I from my perch, she was heavy, she had

short hair, and she moved with purpose,

there in her war-effort kitchen. I thought she had

invented the machine, and owned it, down would

soar, shoulder to shoulder, the ranks of

rations, as if we could see the clever

workings of her mind. When the war ended,

and the little factory was dismantled, she killed

herself. I didn’t know what it meant,

what she had done, as if she had canned

her own spirit. I wish I could thank her

for showing me a woman Hephaistos

at her forge fire. My mother held me up

as if to be blessed by her. I wish her

heaven could have been the earth she had been desiring.

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.

At night my mother tucked me in, with a

jamming motion—her fingertips

against the swag of sheets and blankets

hanging down, where the acme angle of the

Sealy Posturepedic met

the zenith angle of the box spring—she shoved,

stuffing, doubling the layers, suddenly

tightening the bed, racking it one notch

smaller, so the sheets pressed me like a fierce

restraint. I was my mother’s squeeze,

my mother was made of desire leashed.

And my sister and I shared a room—

my mother tucked me in like a pinch,

with a shriek, then wedged my big sister in, with a

softer eek, we were like the parts of a

sexual part, squeaky and sweet,

the room full of girls was her blossom, the house was my

mother’s bashed, pretty ship, she

battened us down, this was our home,

she fastened us down in it, in her sight,

as a part of herself, and she had welcomed that part—

embraced it, nursed it, tucked it in, turned out the light.

There was one for each child, hand-ruled

with the ivory ruler—horizontal

the chores and sins, vertical

the days of the week. And my brother’s and sister’s

charts were spangled with gold stars,

as if those five-point fetlocks of brightness were

the moral fur they were curly with, young

anti-Esaus of the house, and my chart

was a mess of pottage marks, some slots filled

in so hard you could see where the No. 2

Mongol had broken—the rug under the grid

fierce with lead-thorns. My box score

KO, KO, I was Lucifer’s knockout, yet it

makes me laugh now to remember my chart.

Affection for my chart?! As if I am looking

back on matter—my siblings’ stars armed

figures of value, and my x’ed-out boxes

a chambered hatchery of minor

evils, spiny sea-stars, the small

furies of a child’s cross tidal heart.

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.

Filthy lucre, dough, lettuce,

jack, folderola, wherewithal, the ready,

simoleons, fins, tenners, I savored

the smell of money, sour, like ink,

and salty-dirty, like strangers’ thumbs,

we touch it like our mutual skin

tattooed with webs—orb and ray—and with

Abe, and laurel leaves, and Doric

pillars, and urns, acanthus, mint scales,

a key I liked the feel of it,

like old, flannel pajamas, the fiber

worn to a gloss, and the 2 × 6

classic size, which does not change

from generation unto generation as the

hand grows to encompass it—

and I liked the numerals, the curly

5, and the 1 the grandmother president

seems to be guarding,

as if the government would protect your identity

if they could find it, and they didn’t have to kill

too many of your relatives

to get at it. Poor identity,

glad-handed so long, the triangle head all

eye, over the pyramid torso,

parent over child, rock over scissors,

ANNUIT
COEPTIS
over
NOVUS

ORDO
SECLORUM
. A dime a week

if you did your jobs and did not act morally

horrible, which meant, for some, a dime

a year. Now if my mom had paid me, to hit me,

I could have had a payola account,

and been a child whore magnate. No question

what it meant, to see the interest mount up,

the wad of indenture, legal tender—

no question to me what a bill was,

its cry sounded like the diesel train’s

green cry, it was a ticket to ride.

And then I become a fly on the wall

of that room, where the corporal punishment

was done. The humans who are in it mean little

to me—not the offspring, nor the off-sprung—

I turn my back and with maxillae and palps

clean my arms: in each of the hundred

eyes of both my compound eyes,

one wallpaper rose. And if I turn back,

and the two-legged insect is over the lap

of the punishing one, the Venus trap,

I watch, and thrust my narrow hairy

rear into a flower at the rhythm the big one is

onward-Christian-soldiering and

marching-off-to-warring—as she’s smoting,

I’m laying my eggs in the manure of a rose,

pumping to the beat. And my looking is a looking

primed, it is a looking to the power of itself,

and I see a sea folding inward,

200 little seas folding on themselves—

a mess of gene pool crushing down onto

its own shore. Then I turn back

to washing my hands of the chaff that flees off the

threshed onto the threshing floor.

Ho hum, I say, I’m just a flay—

fly light, fly bright, pieces of a species dashed

off onto a wall, chaff of wonder,

chaff of night.

Cobb: it’s akin to Icelandic
kobbi,

seal, and my father could float and fall

asleep on the water, and drift, steady

as a
male swan.
Dip down below gender, it’s

a lump or piece of anything, as of

coal, ore, or stone
—not ashes

but a clod—
usually of a large size

but not too large to be handled by one person
—as at

times, in my life, I have been a dazzled

rounded heap or mass of something
being

glistened almost out of existence.
A cobnut

was the boys’, and
a testicle,
but not
the stone

of a fruit—especially a drupaceous fruit—

or a peapod, or a small stack

of grain or hay, or a bunch of hair,

as a chignon—or a small loaf

of bread, a kind of muffin, a baked apple

dumpling!
Oh father me, tuck me in.

I’ll be the
stocky horse, one having an

artificially high stylish action,

and gladly be the pabulum,
the

string of crystals of sugar of milk,

C
₁₂
H
₂₂
O
₁₁
,

separable from the whey, dextra-

rotatory,
as one might search

through matter for matter one could like being made of.

A mixture consisting of unburned clay,

usually with straw as a binder,

for constructing walls of small buildings,

or matter leaping up like spirit,

a black-backed gull,
or the eight-legged Jesus,

the
spider
—dear Dad, I search for how

to be your daughter, and I find the
wicker

basket
you liked to say you had carried me

around in. And now I want to cob your name

(to strike, to thump, specifically

to beat on the buttocks, as with a strap

or flat stick),
O
young herring,

O
head of a herring.
Dear old awful herring,

let’s go back through
covetous

to
thresh out seed,
let’s go back

to
ore dressing,
to
break into pieces,

break off the waste and low-grade materials
—

it is sweet
to throw, especially gently

or carelessly, to toss,
as if

your carelessness had been some newfangled

gentleness. Your spirit lies in my

spirit this morning
crosswise, as timbers

or logs in cobwork construction,
as we
make

or mend, coarsely,
as I
patch
or
botch

these
cobbl’d
rhymes.