February 8: Without Words, Sharon Olds, "Death"

Sharon Olds wrote so beautifully of her father's death in her collection The Father..

I found myself taking her book off my shelf and reading it this evening.  It was a salve.  It said things I couldn't express.

Saint Marty is without words this evening.

Death

by:  Sharon Olds

Last night I saw James Cagney die
as Lon Chaney, he spelled out I love you
with his hands.  He eyes were wry, narrowed,
as if savoring a cigar and a brandy, he spelled out
Forgive me with that keen savoring look,
then his head feel to the side.  My father
was a reptile lifting its skull, his shoulders
rose up steadily, he was a lizard
approaching an insect,
his mouth was open as if he were pursued,
his hair sluicing back in motionless action.
When the hero dies, they draw away,
as if the dead need more space--
I was bent above my father as he curved up,
and when he died I wanted him to rise up
into me or me to climb down
into his body, we were like two baskets
ripped at the sides which could now be woven together.
He lay there, a child barely conceived
lying on the floor of heaven in a heap
with no one to go to.  He darkened, then,
as if the room were getting brighter,
the way the lights come up at the end and you
look around--surely this
is not the world--

July 27: Nothing Harder, Chalice of His Hands, Poet of the Week, Sharon Olds, "The Waiting"

I had drinks with an old school friend after work today.  We talked about our daughters, families, struggles.  I told him about my sister's health problems, and, when I was done, we sat in silence for a couple of moments.  Then my friend said something like, "There's nothing harder than love."

The night ended with bad news, however.  Dr Junk (I'm not joking--that's his name), my sister's oncologist at the University of Michigan, told my other sister that Sally "isn't responding to the treatment as well as he hoped."  He said, "Maybe it's time to take her home and make her comfortable."  Of course, my other siblings are upset.  They think Dr. Junk isn't giving Sally enough time to respond, that she is improving a little.  "How can he say that?" another of my sisters asked.

I tried to be a voice of reason.  I told them to ask for a second opinion.  I also told them to ask Dr. Junk on what evidence he's basing his assessment.  "But," I said, "we need to think long and hard about this."  I told them that, if the doctor who's consulted for a second opinion agrees with Dr. Junk, then we have a difficult decision to make.  "What's going to be better for her?" I said.  "I don't want my sister dying in a nursing home downstate, surrounded by strangers."

It's the first time I've voiced that thought to members of my family.  Both of my sisters nodded grimly and walked away from me.

I felt horrible saying what I said.  It feels like I'm giving up on my sister.  If I had some kind of divine Magic 8-Ball to help me, I would be shaking it like crazy right now.  But I don't.  I'm not going to do an Ives dip tonight.  I just can't.  Sorry.  This is the passage of which I keep thinking:

At a quarter to two in the morning, he allowed his face to slowly lower into the chalice of his hands, and he wept until he could not see.

I've decided to name Sharon Olds as the Poet of the Week.  I know that Sharon has held the post in the past, but I've been rereading her collection The Father, which is about the death of her father.  It has been speaking to me a great deal.

Saint Marty's friend was right:  there is nothing harder than love.

The Waiting

by:  Sharon Olds 

No matter how early I would get up
and come out of the guest room, and look down the hall,
there between the wings of the wing-back chair
my father would be sitting, his head calm
and dark between the wings.  He sat
unmoving, like something someone has made,
his robe fallen away from his knees,
he sat and stared at the swimming pool
in the dawn.  By then, he knew he was dying,
he seemed to approach it as a job to be done
which he knew how to do.  He got up early
for the graveyard shift.  When he heard me coming down the
hall, he would not turn--he had
a way of holding still to be looked at,
as if a piece of sculpture could sense
the gaze which was running over it--
he would wait with that burnished, looked-at look until
the hem of my nightgown came into view,
then slew his eyes up at me, without
moving his head, and wait, the kiss
came to him, he did not go to it.
Now he would have some company
as he tried to swallow an eighth of a teaspoon
of coffee, he would have his child to give him
the cup to spit into, his child to empty it--
I would be there all day, watch him nap,
be there when he woke, sit with him
until the day ended, and he could get back into
bed with his wife.  Not until the next
dawn would he be alone again, night-
watchman of matter, sitting, facing
the water--the earth without form, and void,
darkness upon the face of it, as if
waiting for his daughter.

Love--hard work even for Jesus

May 10: Center of the Web, Sharon Olds, "His Terror," New Cartoon

She descended to the center of the web and there she began to cut some of her lines.  She worked slowly but steadily while the other creatures drowsed.  None of the others, not even the goose, noticed that she was at work.  Deep in his soft bed, Wilbur snoozed.  Over in their favorite corner, the goslings whistled a night song.

Again, this description of Charlotte at work on her web is a great metaphor for the writing process.  Writing is a very solitary act, done while others go about life's normal rhythms.  While Charlotte weaves, the other creatures drowse, snooze, and whistle night songs.

I am still at work on the poem for my brother's funeral.  I have made little progress.  However, I'm not at the panic stage yet.  That will come tomorrow night.

I'm sort of stuck on Sharon Olds' book The Father at the moment.  Therefore, tonight's poem comes from that collection:

His Terror

He loves the portable altar the minister
brings to the hospital, its tiny cruets and
phials, its cross that stands up
when the lid opens, like the ballerina who un-
bent, when I opened my jewelry box, she
rose and twirled like the dead.  Then the lid
folded her down, bowing, in the dark,
the way I would wait, under my bed,
for morning.  My father has forgotten that,
he opens his mouth for the porous disc
to be laid on his tongue, he loves to call the minister Father.
And yet, somewhere in his body, is there terror?
The lumps of the cancer are everywhere now,
he can lay his palm where they swell his skin, he can
finger the holes where the surgeon has been in him.
He asks me to touch them.
Maybe his terror is not of dying,
or even of death, but of some cry
he has kept inside him all his life
and there are weeks left.

It's a beautiful, terrifying poem.  It's totally Sharon Olds in all its raw honesty.

Saint Marty should be so lucky to write such a poem for his brother.

Confessions of Saint Marty

 

April 20: Daddy's Going to Kill You, Sharon Olds, "The Father," New Cartoon

"Daddy's going to kill you.  He's going to kill you," she said.

Holden doesn't have a great relationship with his father.  His dad is a highly successful corporate lawyer who produces Broadway shows.  Holden is his middle son who can't seem to get his crap together.  Holden's sister, Phoebe, knows that Holden and their father have issues.  When she finds out Holden has been kicked out of school again, her immediate response is simple:  "Daddy's going to kill you."

As I informed you earlier this week, Sharon Olds just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Stag's Leap.  I don't own a copy of Stag's Leap yet, but I do own a copy of her book The Father, a collection of poems about her relationship with, you guessed it, her father.  The poems are full of beauty and pain, detailing a father/daughter bond that is fraught with complications.  The father in the poems is dying of cancer, and the speaker is caring for him during his final days.  As can be expected, the situation stirs up all the emotions, deep and raw, harbored throughout a lifetime.

One of the deepest poems of The Father is about words, the final shared exchange between daughter and father:

Last Words

Three days ago, my suitcases
were hunched there, in his hospital room,
in the corner, I had to pick them up
by the scruff of their necks, and leave him.  I kept
putting them down, and going back
to kiss him again although he was exhausted,
shining like tarnished silver, and yet
I could not seem to pick up those bags
and walk out the door the last time.  I kept
going back to the mouth he would lift, his
forehead glittering with effort, his eyes
slewing back, shying, until
finally he cried out Last kiss!
and I kissed him and left.  This morning, his wife
called to tell me he has ceased to speak,
so those are his last words to me,
the ones he is leaving me with--and it is ending with a kiss--
a command for mercy, the offer of his cracked
creator lips.  To plead that I leave,
my father asked me for a kiss!  I would not
leave till he had done so, I will not let thee go except thou beg for it.

It's a holy moment, a sacred thing, the last words exchanged between child and father.  The very last line of the poem is filled with ancient yearnings, the inability to surrender, to let go, of father love.  Not all of the poems are this tender.  The love expressed in Sharon Olds' poems is tough, hard as permafrost.  It doesn't melt easily.  It distills, warms over time into something alive and nurturing at the end of the book, where the father has the last word.  The poem, titled "My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead," concludes,

...
I have been in a body without breath,
I have been in the morgue, in fire, in the slagged
chimney, in the air over the earth,
and buried in the earth, and pulled down
into the ocean--where I have been
I understand this life, I am matter,
your father, I made you, when I say now that I love you
I mean look down at your hand, move it,
that action is matter's love, for human
love go elsewhere.

It's a comforting moment, an extension of father love into something beyond matter and time, into eternity.


The Father fills Saint Marty with hope for love never dies.  It transforms into something deeper, like snow into melt into earth into lilacs, like words into kiss into memory into poetry.

Confessions of Saint Marty