Rites of Passage

As the guests arrive at my son’s party
they gather in the living room –
short men, men in first grade
with smooth jaws and chins.
Hands in pockets, they stand around
jostling, jockeying for place, small fights
breaking out and calming. One says to another
How old are you? Six. I’m seven. So?
They eye each other, seeing themselves
tiny in the other’s pupils. They clear their
throats a lot, a room of small bankers,
they fold their arms and frown. I could beat you
up, a seven says to a six,
the dark cake, round and heavy as a
turret, behind them on the table. My son,
freckles like specks of nutmeg on his cheeks,
chest narrow as the balsa keel of a
model boat, long hands
cool and thin as the day they guided him
out of me, speaks up as a host
for the sake of the group.
We could easily kill a two-year-old,
he says in his clear voice. The other
men agree, they clear their throats
like Generals, they relax and get down to
playing war, celebrating my son’s life.

From “The Dead and the Living”

The Pope’s Penis

It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat — and at night,
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.

From “The Gold Cell”

My Son the Man

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms, what I had always wanted,
my son the baby. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

From “The Wellspring”

When they found you, you were not breathing.

It was ten degrees below freezing, and you were

wrapped only in plastic. They lifted you

up out of the litter basket, as one

lifts a baby out of the crib after nap

and they unswaddled you from the Sloan’s shopping bag.

As far as you were concerned it was all over,

you were feeling nothing, everything had stopped

some time ago,

and they bent over you and forced the short

knife-blade of breath back

down into your chest, over and

over, until you began to feel

the pain of life again. They took you

from silence and darkness right back

through birth, the gasping, the bright lights, they

achieved their miracle: on the second

day of the new year they brought you

back to being a boy whose parents

left him in a garbage can,

and everyone in the Emergency Room

wept to see your very small body

moving again. I saw you on the news,

the discs of the electrocardiogram

blazing like medals on your body, your hair

thick and ruffed as the head of a weed, your

large intelligent forehead dully

glowing in the hospital TV light, your

mouth pushed out as if you are angry, and

something on your upper lip, a

dried glaze from your nose,

and I thought how you are the most American baby,

child of all of us through your very

American parents, and through the two young medics,

Lee Merklin and Frank Jennings,

who brought you around and gave you their names,

forced you to resume the hard

American task you had laid down so young,

and though I see the broken glass on your path, the

shit, the statistics — you will be a man who

wraps his child in plastic and leaves it in the trash — I

see the light too as you saw it

forced a second time in silver ice between your lids, I am

full of joy to see your new face among us,

Lee Frank Merklin Jennings I am

standing here in dumb American praise for your life.

Copyright ) 1985 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. No use of this material is authorized without the express written consent of the Licensor.

“I GO BACK TO MAY 1937″

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the

wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips black in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it — she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,

but don’t do it. I want to live. I

take them up like the male and female

paper dolls and bang them together

at the hips like chips of flint as if to

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Excerpted with permission of the writer from “The Gold Cell,” ) 1987 by Sharon Olds.