I breathed on the glass
of my other lives
so I could write in the fog.
Replied yes to all,
baked cakes, swore off
certain unproductive behaviors,
such as this. I gave myself obscene permission,
then ran thudding back to safety,
as if zombie-chased. Frequently, I used
the tent, the ear of corn.
Never, if possible, irradiated cats
or vicious laughter or any of the shocked humans.
When I first heard my child echo my voice—
No, no, no!—when speaking to my other child:
face with no good gesture.
“It shall be born in mind,” Wharton once wrote, “that, while the main purpose of a door is to admit, its secondary purpose is to exclude.”
From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.
Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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