North South East West

An old girl am I
Wear my grandmother's pearls girl, am I
Been all over the world kind of girl
Looked in every nook and cranny,
been down the winding streets only
lonely

In the South,
was a Mexican mistress
she awaited my return
to hear my stories of gold

through the gulleys, children roared
while machines played ring-around-the-rosey.
Not a pocket full of posies, had I
Only a handful of sorrows
and now it was all told.

So I hitched my sack and bid farewell,
kissed my mistress to make it last.
Turned my eyes against the sun
I heard, overhead
the call of
The North -
what more to be said?

Such a varied landscape,
The North:
from East to West
or East, West?
or West. East.
all of nature seems the same to me
and for some silence in mind,
I forsake society.

Travel the road,
the craggly rocks,
kindly now, like an old man's smile,
plenty of tooth, but
no life and I whisper,
grateful, grateful even...
to be alive.

- Remnants of the essence and wisps of a poem I dreamt

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 opened 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 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.

- Sharon Olds (from The Gold Cell)