Temat: Poezja anglojęzyczna
Sharon Olds (ur. 1942) – poetka amerykańska. Urodziła się w San Francisco. Ukończyła studia w zakresie filologii angielskiej na Uniwersytecie Stanforda, następnie obroniła doktorat z historii literatury na Uniwersytecie Columbia w Nowym Jorku. Po obronie, na schodach biblioteki uniwersyteckiej, doznała olśnienia, które zaważyło na jej dalszym życiu. Postanowiła, że zostanie poetką, nawet gdyby musiała zapomnieć wszystko, czego się wcześniej nauczyła. Debiutowała w 1980 roku tomikiem „Satan Says”. Następnie wydała: „The Dead and the Living” (1983), „The Gold Cell” (1987), „The Matter of This World” (1987), „The Sign of Saturn” (1991), „The Father” (1992), „The Wellspring” (1996). „Blood, Tin, Straw” (1999), „The Unswept Room” (2002), „Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002” (2004), „One Secret Thing” (2008).
Za swą twórczość została nagrodzona wieloma prestiżowymi nagrodami, m. in.:
1980 Poetry Center Award (1980 – za debiut literacki), „Lamont Poetry Prize” (1984 – za tom „The Dead and the Living”), „National Book Critics Cirlce Award” (1984 – za tom „The Dead and the Living” ; 1992 – za tom „The Father”). Prowadziła zajęcia terapeutyczno-literackie w Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island w Nowym Korku. Obecnie prowadzi warsztaty poetyckie na uniwersytecie w Nowym Jorku. Jej wiersze tłumaczyła na polski Julia Hartwig. Wydano je w antologii:
Julia Hartwig: Dzikie brzoskwinie. Wyd. Sic! Warszawa 2003.
Z tomu „Satan Says” (1980)
Satan Says
I am locked in a little cedar box
with a picture of shepherds pasted onto
the central panel between carvings.
The box stands on curved legs.
It has a gold, heart-shaped lock
and no key. I am trying towrite my
way out of the closed box
redolent of cedar. Satan
comes to me in the locked box
and says,
I'll get you out. Say
My father is a shit. I say
my father is a shit and Satan
laughs and says,
It's opening.
Say your mother is a pimp.
My mother is a pimp. Something
opens and breaks when I say that.
My spine uncurls in the cedar box
like the pink back of the ballerina pin
with a ruby eye, resting beside me on
satin in the cedar box.
Say shit, say death, say fuck the father,
Satan says, down my ear.
The pain of the locked past buzzes
in the child's box on her bureau, under
the terrible round pond eye
etched around with roses, where
self-loathing gazed at sorrow.
Shit. Death. Fuck the father.
Something opens. Satan says
Don't you feel a lot better?
Light seems to break on the delicate
edelweiss pin, carved in two
colors of wood. I love him too,
you know, I say to Satan dark
in the locked box. I love them but
I'm trying to say what happened to us
in the lost past.
Of Course, he says
and smiles,
of course. Now say: torture.
I see, through blackness soaked in cedar,
the edge of a large hinge open.
Say: the father's cock, the mother's
cunt, says Satan.
I'll get you out.
The angle of the hinge widens
until I see the outlines of
the time before I was, when they were
locked in the bed. When I say
the magic words, Cock, Cunt,
Satan softly says,
Come out.
But the air around the opening
is heavy and thick as hot smoke.
Come in, he says, and I feel his voice
breathing from the opening.
The exit is through Satan's mouth.
Come in my mouth, he says,
you're there
already, and the huge hinge
begins to close. Oh no, I loved
them, too, I brace
my body tight
in the cedar house.
Satan sucks himself out the keyhole.
I'm left locked in the box, he seals
the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue.
It's your coffin now, Satan says.
I hardly hear;
I am warming my cold
hands at the dancer's
ruby eye-
the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.
Z tomu „The Gold Cell” (1987)
Sex Without Love
How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.
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 I 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.
Z tomu „The Father” (1992)
One Year
When I got to his marker, I sat on it,
like sitting on the edge of someone's bed
and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite.
I took some tears from my jaw and neck
and started to wash a corner of his stone.
Then a black and amber ant
ran out onto the granite, and off it,
and another ant hauled a dead
ant onto the stone, leaving it, and not coming back.
Ants ran down into the grooves of his name
and dates, down into the oval track of the
first name's O, middle name's O,
the short O of his last name,
and down into the hyphen between
his birth and death-little trough of his life.
Soft bugs appeared on my shoes,
like grains of pollen, I let them move on me,
I rinsed a dark fleck of mica,
and down inside the engraved letters
the first dots of lichen were appearing
like stars in early evening.
I saw the speedwell on the ground with its horns,
the coiled ferns, copper-beech blossoms, each
petal like that disc of matter which
swayed, on the last day, on his tongue.
Tamarack, Western hemlock,
manzanita, water birch
with its scored bark,
I put my arms around a trunk and squeezed it,
then I lay down on my father's grave.
The sun shone down on me, the powerful
ants walked on me. When I woke,
my cheek was crumbly, yellowish
with a mustard plaster of earth. Only
at the last minute did I think of his body
actually under me, the can of
bone, ash, soft as a goosedown
pillow that bursts in bed with the lovers.
When I kissed his stone it was not enough,
when I licked it my tongue went dry a moment, I
ate his dust, I tasted my dirt host.
Anonymous submission.
I Wanted to Be There When My Father Died
I wanted to be there when my father died
because I wanted to see him die—
and not just to know him, down to
the ground, the dirt of his unmaking, and not
just to give him a last chance
to give me something, or take his loathing
back. All summer he had gagged, as if trying
to cough his whole esophagus out,
surely his pain and depression had appeased me,
and yet I wanted to see him die
not just to see no soul come
free of his body, no magical genie of
spirit jump
forth from his mouth,
proving the body on earth is all we have got,
I wanted to watch my father die
because I hate him. Oh, I love him,
my hands cherished him so, his lying as if dead on the
flowered couch had pummeled me,
his silence had mauled me, I was an Eve
he took and pressed back into clay,
casual thumbs undoing the cheekbone
eye-socket rib pelvis ankle of the child
and now I watched him be undone and
someone in me gloried in it,
someone lying where he’d lain in chintz
Eden, some corpse girl, corkscrewed like
one of his amber spit-ems, smiled.
The priest was well called to that room,
violet grosgrain of his ribbon laid
down well on that bank of flesh
where the daughter of death was made, it was well to say
into other hands than ours
we commend this spirit.
Z tomu „The Wellspring” (1996)
True Love
In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I hobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex-surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.
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 to 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. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.
High School Senior
For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
-this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say "college," but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever-I try to see
this house without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak's
wing, but I can't. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young
for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me-no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.
Z tomu „One Secret Thing” (2008)
What Could Happen
When the men and women went into hidding,
they knew what could happen if the others caught them.
They knew their bodies might be undone,
their sexual organs taken as if
to destroy the mold so the human could not
be made anymore. They knew what the others
went for – the center of the body,
and not just for the agony and horror but to
send them crudely barren into death,
throwing those bodies down in the village at dawn
to show that all was ended. But each
time the others dumped a body in the square,
a few more people took to the woods,
as if springing up, there,
from the loam dark as body's wound.
When He Came for the Family
They looked at their daughter standing with her music
in her hand, the page covered with dots and
lines, with its shared language. They knew
families had been taken. What they did not know
was the way he would pick her cello up
by the scroll neck and take its amber
torso-shape and lift it and break it
against the fireplace. The brickwork crushed the
close-grained satiny wood, they stood and
stared at him.
The Signal
When they brought his body back, they told
his wife how he’d died:
the general thought they had taken the beach,
and sent in his last reserves. In the smokescreen,
the boats moved toward shore. Her husband
was the first man in the first boat
to move through the smoke and see the sand
dark with bodies, the tanks burning,
the guns thrown down, the landing craft
wrecked and floored with blood. In the path of the
bullets and shells from the shore, her husband had
put on a pair of white gloves
and turned his back on the enemy,
motioning to the boats behind him
to turn back. After everyone else
on his boat was dead
he continued to signal, then he, too,
was killed, but the other boats had seen him
and turned back. They gave his wife the medal,
and she buried him, and at night floated through
a wall of smoke, and saw him at a distance
standing in a boat, facing her,
the gloves blazing on his hands as he motioned her back.
Little End Ode
When I told my mother the joke--the new kid
at college, who asked where the library's at,
and the sophomore who said, "At Yale, we do not
end our sentences with prepositions,"
whereupon the frosh said, "Oh,
I beg your pardon, where's the library
at, asshole," she shrieked with delight.
"'Asshole,'" she murmured fondly. She's become
so fresh, rinsed with sweetness, as if she is
music, the strings especially high and bright.
She says it and sighs with contentment, as if she has
finally talked back to her own mother.
Or maybe it is the closest she has come,
for a while, to the rich, animal life
she lived with her second husband--now
I can see that of course she touched him everywhere,
as lovers do. She touched me there,
you know, courteously, with oil
like myrrh; soon after she had given me life
she gave me pleasure, which gave her pleasure,
maybe it felt to her fingertip like the
complex, clean knot of her Firegirls
tie-clasp. She seems, these days, like a very
human goddess. I do not want her
to die. This feels like a new not-want,
a shalt-not-want not-want. As soon as I
dared, around fifty, I called her, to myself,
the A-word. And yet, now, if she goes,
when she goes, to me it is like the departure of a
whole small species of singing bird from the earth.
Z ostatnich utworów
Baby Want
When I heard a baby call out, suddenly
I wanted to be inconvenient to my mother,
to summon her, to wake in her
a pull to come toward me, even at a time
she did not want to, especially at a time
she did not want to –
I want to send my little melody
out, and bring a mother back
with it. When the world was still scored in crib-time,
I was a fisher of women, I cast
my hookless vowel out. Now,
I want to replay it, the instant her consciousness would
suddenly include me, and warp toward me,
there’s almost affection in the malice with which
I want my heart’s darling, commander
of my bowels, to be annoyed, I want
to turn over, in the womb, in the night,
under Orion, in my mother’s sleep,
and lean – against the warm, amber
pillow of her full bladder – my birth-term weight.
Funny I Wasn’t
It’s funny I wasn’t afraid of my mother
after she was dead – say an hour after.
It’s strange to me. As she did her long,
complex dying – breathing, not breathing, then
the baby rattle, the diamondback rales, then her
face moistening, as if it was lifting
into a low cloud, or lowering
over a stove, a kettle for a steamer, God’s
kitchen towel over her head – as she
died, and died, it was as if I was
with our species at its nuptials with its
dying. I held her, circled in my arm,
not to hold her back, and yet
how could she go, as if the blue-wreathed
planet itself were departing, and I was
standing on something, waving to the earth as it got
smaller. And then, there she was –
the material object, and yet fresh
as a fresh-born baby released from the sea
of the womb. Who could have feared the new, the
little, motionless soldier of her.
And an hour later, once I had turned
away, and come back, she wasn’t at all like the
night-terrors figure, who used to hover
above me, in my bed, in the night. Dead,
her forehead did assume a faint
shell of garden snail look, but she was
nothing like that airborne, prone
hecate with the wounded and wounding face.
No longer. She was gone to where
they cannot scare you, any more,
no one, now, stood between
me and my life – unless there was a small
figure taking shape in me,
copying the scepter on
the hospice gurney. From now on,
it couldn’t be my mother who was fearsome to me.
It would have to be me.
Ode to a Composting Toilet
And then, at the green inn, there
it was, the magic chamber—in goes
one thing, out comes another—where what we
make is made into fertilizer,
the hopper an enamel tank where the liquids
are separated from the solids, where the enzymes
and vinegar, in the forest-green
interior, do their unpaid
labor, and what can be used again
sinks down to where it can be harvested,
near-odorless. We do not think
our shit smells good, but we do not think
the earth should be turned into a great cesspool
to accommodate our desire to part from our
offal as fast as possible.
In this drying cabinet, shit happens,
and then, over time, it alters its nature,
its little busy toxins die,
it turns to arable waste—waste
no longer, waste not want not. As in
a blood bank, but dirtier,
soilier, the effluvium of the offspring
of the earth mingles: fertilizer of
New Hampshire, Kenya, New York, Boston-
Yankees shit, Red Sox shit,
in excremental harmony;
vegan shit, kosher shit,
slow food, fast, vegetarian,
fruititarian, even the sorrowful
wisps of anorexic shit,
and Calvinist shit, and Kabbala shit,
Halliburton employee shit,
Orthodox shit, Puritan shit,
lesbian shit, nympho virgin
poet chick shit. Seas and rivers
love the composting toilet, lakes and
streams sparkle its praises, and the small
creatures of the pond and creek
keen for it-dark green machine
like a porcelain throne, though its royal flush
is inside it. Come sit on it, come be
its queen or king.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40qRBA76E3I
Inne wiersze Sharon Olds w tematach:
Rodzeństwo, Dziecko jest chodzącym cudem..., Motyw ojca,
Człowiek i jego charakterMarta K. edytował(a) ten post dnia 18.09.11 o godzinie 08:14
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