arguchik | saturday night doings

last night i went to that salon with

glaucon. most of the time it was too crowded and busy with laughing and ass sniffing and karaoke to be a "real" salon, but toward the end it thinned down to 10 or so people, and several of us read things. i read a sharon olds poem about a girl who survived a horrific crime that left her best friend dead--they were 12; the poem is based on an actual crime that happened in essex junction, vt (i used to work very near where it happened). it was a little out of place among the other pieces read. everyone else (except

glaucon, who read a robert lowell poem and one of his own) read more upbeat, inspirational stuff. i find this particular poem inspirational, but it goes through heavy terrain on its way there. i also wonder if it commits the poetic sin of too much-ness. it's definitely on the edge of that, in my opinion, but i think it somehow narrowly misses being excessively melodramatic. it's interesting, though, because a couple of poems i heard at the slam the other night did veer into excessive melodrama, and they made me cringe and even laugh because they were too nakedly traumatic or tragic, and i'm not sure i could articulate where those poems went wrong and this one doesn't. i guess i could if i put my mind to it, but my prospectus needs that part of my brain more urgently. triage. dig?

The Girl
(by Sharon Olds, from The Gold Cell)

They chased her and her friend through the woods
and caught them in a small clearing, broken
random bracken, a couple of old mattresses,
the dry ochre of foam rubber,
as if the place had been prepared.
The thin one with black hair
started raping her best friend,
and the blond one stood above her,
thrust his thumbs back inside her jaws, she was 12,
stuck his penis in her mouth and throat
faster and faster and faster.
Then the black-haired one stood up--
they lay like pulled-up roots at his feet,
two naked 12-year-old girls, he said
Now you're going to know what it's like
to be shot 5 times and slaughtered like a pig,
and they switched mattresses,
the blond was raping and stabbing her friend,
the black-haired one sticking inside her
in one place and then another,
the point of his gun pressed deep into her waist,
she felt a little click in her spine and a
sting like 7-up in her head and then he
pulled the tree-branch across her throat
and everything went dark,
the gym went dark, and her mother's kitchen,
even the globes of light on the rounded
lips of her mother's nesting bowls went dark.

When she woke up she was lying on the cold
iron-smelling earth, she was under the mattress,
pulled up over her like a
blanket at night,
she saw the body of her best friend
and she began to run,
she came to the edge of the woods and she stepped
out from the trees, like a wound debriding,
she walked across the field to the tracks
and said to the railway brakeman Please, sir. Please, sir.

At the trial she had to say everything--
her big sister taught her the words--
she had to sit in the room with them and
point to them. Now she goes to parties
but does not smoke, she is a cheerleader,
she throws her body up in the air
and kicks her legs and comes home and does the dishes
and her homework, she has to work hard in math,
the night over the roof of her bed
filled with white planets. Every night she
prays for the soul of her best friend and
then thanks God for life. She knows
what all of us want never to know
and she does a cartwheel, the splits, she shakes the
shredded pom-poms in her fists.