Strike Sparks by Sharon Olds

Author:Sharon Olds [Olds, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54760-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

41, Alone, No Gerbil

In the strange quiet, I realize

there’s no one else in the house. No bucktooth

mouth pulls at a stainless-steel teat, no

hairy mammal runs on a treadmill—

Charlie is dead, the last of our children’s half-children.

When our daughter found him lying in the shavings, trans-

mogrified backwards from a living body

into a bolt of rodent bread

she turned her back on early motherhood

and went on single, with nothing. Crackers,

Fluffy, Pretzel, Biscuit, Charlie,

buried on the old farm we bought

where she could know nature. Well, now she knows it

and it sucks. Creatures she loved, mobile and

needy, have gone down stiff and indifferent,

she will not adopt again though she cannot

have children yet, her body is like

a blueprint for a woman’s body,

so now everything stops, for a while,

now I must wait many years

to hear in this house again the faint

powerful call of a young animal.

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