Alcatraz

A few days ago, Nymeth featured a poem by Sharon Olds about her father, from a recent volume (The Father) that I haven't yet read. Reading that one, I remembered this Sharon Olds poem (from The Gold Cell), which has always been one of my favorites, partly because it's so good out loud:

Alcatraz

When I was a girl, I knew I was a man
because they might send me to Alcatraz
and only men went to Alcatraz.
Every time we drove to the city I'd
see it there, white as a white
shark in the shark-rich Bay, the bars like
milk-white ribs. I knew I had pushed my
parents too far, my inner badness had
spread like ink and taken me over, I could
not control my terrible thoughts,
terrible looks, and they had often said
they would send me there--maybe the very next
time I spilled my milk, Ala
Cazam, the iron doors would slam, I'd be
there where I belonged, a girl-faced man in the
prison no one had escaped from. I did not
fear the other prisoners,
I knew who they were, men like me who had
spilled their milk one time too many,
not been able to curb their thoughts--
what I feared was the horror of the circles: circle of
sky around the earth, circle of
land around the Bay, circle of
water around the island, circle of
sharks around the shore, circle of
outer walls, inner walls,
iron girders, steel bars,
circle of my cell around me, and there at the
center, the glass of milk and the guard's
eyes upon me as I reached out for it.

Doesn't that take you back to what it feels like to be young and helpless before the court of your parents, in a world of seemingly arbitrary and impossibly rigid adult rules?

Chat Line

I've been looking for a poem to read out loud. I thought about one from Christian Bok's new volume Eunoia, introduced to me by Kiirstin at A Book a Week, because it's so much fun to say "If Klimpt limns it/If Liszt lilts it," but I think I'll keep looking. It's one of the pleasures of this snowy week; I have another few days to come up with something good.

In the meantime, here's a kind of poem that is not fun out loud. This one, by John Menaghan, is meant to be seen:

Chat Line
(in a bus shelter)

I.
"Are you living
with Autism?
Do you want to
talk to someone?
Call Autism
Link now.
You don't have to
go it alone!"

II.
Are you living?
With Autism?
Do you want to?

Talk to someone.
Call Autism.
Link now.

You don't have to!
Go it alone!

Do you have a favorite poem for reading out loud? Children's poems, parodies, and nonsense rhymes are always good. Any Robert Service poem is good, as my friend Laura has repeatedly demonstrated. I love to sing an Emily Dickinson poem to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" or Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway." Sharon Olds hardly ever fails to seize an audience's attention; one of my favorites of hers for reading out loud is "The American Way," a prose poem. But I'm looking for something new. Where should I look?

Until the other shoe falls

I did something this morning I haven't done for years. I turned the doorknob ever so quietly and crept into my almost-thirteen-year-old son's bedroom ever so softly to look at him in his bed--because he'd slept so long I wanted to make sure he was still breathing. He was, and his fever had gone down from the astonishingly strained white-faced look I'd seen last night and in my dreams. Today it seems an ordinary bout with the flu, and I thought of this poem because I'm so glad I no longer feel this way every time he gets sick:

When My Son Is Sick, by Sharon Olds

When my son is so sick that he falls asleep
in the middle of the day, his small oval
hard head hurting so much he
prefers to let go of consciousness like
someone dangling from a burning rope just
letting go of his life, I sit and
hardly breathe. I think about the
half-liquid skin of his lips,
swollen and nicked with red slits like the
fissures in a volcano crust, down
which you see the fire. Though I am
down the hall from him I see the
quick bellies of his eyeballs jerk
behind the greenish lids, his temples
red and sour with pain, his skin going
pale gold as cold butter and then
turning a little like rancid butter till the
freckles seem to spread, black little
islands of mold, he sleeps the awful
sleep of the sick, his hard-working heart
banging like pipes inside his body, like a
shoe struck on iron bars when
someone wants to be let out, I
sit, I sit very still, I am out at the
rim of the world, the edge they saw
when they knew it was flat--the torn edge,
thick and soil-black, the vessels and
veins and tendons hanging free,
dangling down,
when my boy is sick I sit on the lip of
nothing and hang my legs over
and sometimes let a shoe fall
to give it something.

The image of a shoe falling is less scary to me now than in years past, largely because it's turned into a vaguely comic image... When one of us gets sick---and my son is the first to succumb, probably because he can't wash the hand emerging from his splint very well--I spend my day as a nurse waiting for the other shoe to fall. Who will catch it next?

Mind Control

Have you ever had one of those nights when your mind kept going back to something you didn't want to think about, and then you went to sleep, finally, only to wake up about 3 am for further brooding over the things you didn't want to think about?

I made the mistake of reading through a volume of poetry by Sharon Olds last night before I went to bed, and the power of one of her poems started me off thinking about the extremely gory details of the worst night of my life, the night after Eleanor, then 10, fell during a girl scout trip to the local skating rink and broke both bones in both arms, and after I got her to the local ER, she had to be transported by ambulance to a Children's Hospital about an hour away, where they set her arm without the right kind of anesthesia because they couldn't tell how much and what kind of painkiller she'd gotten at the local ER. This poem just brings it all flooding back:

The Green Shirt

For a week after he breaks his elbow
we don't think about giving him a bath,
we think about bones twisted like white
saplings in a tornado, tendons
twined around each other like the snakes on the
healer's caduceus. We think about fractures and
pain, most of the time we think about pain,
and our boy with his pale set face goes
around the house in that green shirt
as if it were his skin, the alligator on it with
wide jaws like the ones pain has
clamped on his elbow, fine joint that
used to be thin and elegant as
something made with Tinkertoy then it
swelled to a hard black anvil,
softened to a bruised yellow fruit,
finally we could slip the sleeve over,
and by then our boy was smelling like something
taken from the back of the icebox and
put on the back of the stove. So we stripped him and
slipped him into the tub, he looked so
naked without the sling, just a boy
holding his arm with the other hand as you'd
help and old geezer across the street, and
then it hit us, the man and woman by the
side of the tub, the people who had made him,
then the week passed before our eyes
as the grease slid off him--
the smash, the screaming, the fear he had crushed his
growth-joint, the fear as he lost all the
feeling in two fingers, the blood
pooled in ugly uneven streaks
under the skin in his forearm and then he
lost the use of the whole hand,
and they said he would probably sometime be back to normal,
sometime, probably, this boy with the long fingers of a surgeon,
this duck sitting in the water with his L-shaped
purple wing in his other hand.
Our eyes fill, we cannot look at each other,
we watch him carefully and kindly soap the damaged arm,
he was given to us perfect, we had sworn no harm
would come to him.

Why this poem brought back that particular harm on this particular night, I don't know. It was spring when it happened, and maybe there was a smell, in addition to the poem, to trigger all the details of memory. We are all healed now. It's daytime. The sun is out. The azaleas and rhododendrons are blooming. I need to wake up.