Carole Simmons Oles
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Carole Simmons Oles is the author of eight books of poems, most recently the chapbook GREATEST HITS (1979-2005) from Pudding House Publications, and WAKING STONE: INVENTIONS ON THE LIFE OF HARRIET HOSMER, published by University of Arkansas Press in Fall 2006.
Among her awards are an NEA Grant in Poetry, the Virginia Prize, two Strousse Awards from Prairie Schooner, a Pushcart Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s Gertrude B. Claytor Prize and Robert H. Winner and Ruth Lake Memorial Awards. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Field, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Women’s Review of Books and other magazines.
She has taught at University of Massachusetts/ Boston, Hollins College, and Old Dominion University, and been Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College. Since 1992 she has been on the faculty at California State University in Chico, where she is Professor Emerita. She currently divides her time between Chico and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
For many summers, she was on the faculty at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont; she also did stints at Port Townsend and Bennington Workshops. She has been a fellow at The MacDowell Colony and a Visiting Artist/Scholar at American Academy in Rome.
Oles was born in New York City and graduated from Queens College and the University of California at Berkeley.
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I MISBEHAVE: SELF-DEFENSES
1840-1845
1.
I have to shoot the robin to take it apart
to study its bones and attachments
make it calm and still. I have to keep
it from flying, the feathers spread, the cunning
all held by pins for me to get it right.
Father gives me bow and arrow, ivory gun
with a silver nose. I learn to use them.
By the river, in the yard I mix clay
and mould it, my models the worthies
my neighbors won't touch:
frog, snake, rat. Am I strange? eccentric?
I am a girl who won't be ground down.
I shape the ground.
2.
To you, Schoolmaster Tedium (Peabody)
who never could entrap me
in your tight desks and canon,
I recommend a book I've read of late:
whose heroine, like me, has a message
writ on her back—do you recall sending me
home to Father with a list of my crimes
pinned behind me?—she is called
Woman Warrior
if you, Mr. P., take my meaning.
3.
All right, so it was dangerous.
I like danger, always. I take the reins.
Yes I ride standing on my horse.
Dared, I ride alone all night to Boston.
Why wait, knitting, for danger to arrive?
Though a girl, I want to engineer.
How droll to uncouple the train—
engine chugging toward Boston
while the passenger cars, gaping, stay home.
When I'm caught with my hand on the links
Father pays damages.
I almost got away with it.
Which of you told?
4.
I confess I killed the Doctor. Well, "killed."
Eliakim Morse looking like Scrooge in his dressing gown,
white stringy hair crawling from his velvet cap.
All he has left is money, for which the town
parts, a Red Sea. Eliakim Morse in his yellow carriage,
more years upon him than the four—
mother, sister, two brothers—we lost.
I take charge of death and send a notice
to the papers, then hide among Dutch elms
to watch mourners call at his house.
This is my last, worst offense,
worse by far than nearly drowning,
What will people say?
Father rides me out of town.
RUMOR
a collage of quotations: Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lydia
Maria Child, John Gibson,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Frederic Leighton, Maria Mitchell,
and anonymous
Miss Hosmer is very willful & too independent by half.
Whatever I can teach her she shall learn.
Her voice seemed unmodulated and her manners brusque.
The queerest, best-natured little chap possible.
Whatever I shall teach her she can learn.
Hatty is compromising herself with Mr. X—What a pity!
The dearest, best-natured little chap possible.
A remarkably ugly little gray-haired boy, adorned with a diamond
necklace.
Hatty is promising herself to Mr. X—What a pity!
She's a little rude—a good deal eccentric—but she's always true.
A remarkably ugly little gray-haired boy, shorn of the diamond necklace.
One of the frankest, bluntest, nicest little creatures that ever took
my fancy.
She's ridden nude!—a real eccentric. What? I'm always true.
Marian knelt before Hatty & placed on her finger a ruby in the form of
a heart.
One of the frankest, bluntest, nicest little creatures. Never took my
fancy.
I have gained by being less ready than she to believe slanderous gossip.
Marian knelt before Hatty & placed on her finger a ruby, from her heart.
Miss Hosmer's want of modesty is enough to disgust a dog.
I remained less ready than she to grieve at slanderous gossip.
She worked in secret. She had few confidants.
Miss Hosmer wants modesty enough. Disgusting frog.
Her voice seemed unmodulated and her manners risqué.
She worked in secret. She had new confidence.
Miss Hosmer is very skillful but too independent by half.
ASTORIA, NEW YORK INTERLUDE: ITALIAN NOTEBOOK
I.
Bruno, husband of Maria, son-in-law
of Guiseppe Marino, sitting on our couch
extols Puccini whom my parents never heard of
and I just heard in Music 101.
In his half-good tenor voice, Bruno
gives us excerpts of his favorite arias
from La Bohème, Madame Butterfly, tears
brimming as he sings. Mr. Marino
a stonecarver like my father, but schooled
in the old country to execute angels and saints
by pointing—or "pernting" as my father says.
How mathematical my dropout father had to be.
II.
Tough Patty Saporito from 33rd Street:
her mother prematurely white, or maybe
older than Luigi her rakish, mustached husband
who one night when I am sleeping over
comes home late full of red wine
and throws up in the sink. Next day
we visit their relatives with a yard blessed
by Mary and assorted saints to watch the vegetables
and baby cousins staggering along the rows,
beyond fatigue by nightfall when the uncles
start to sing. So different from mine,
the dour, unmarried uncles and aunts cohabiting
in silence. They need music, pasta, wine
—not boiled meat and dry potatoes.
III.
Rose Cicogna, my friend Rosie's mother
cooks strange food we almost never eat.
We eat corned beef or other fatty flesh.
I feed mine to the dog under the table.
Dumb, she shows all over what she's won.
Or I wrap the half-chewed clumps
inside my napkin, flush them later.
Rosie's mother, the only braless mother
I know, sometimes lifts a breast
onto her forearm for mechanical support.
Rosie's mother always worries, later
has a breakdown. Her sister Anna visits
and they tell secrets in Italian.
One afternoon Rosie's mother comes home
finds Rosie, proud of her budding,
prancing naked before two girlfriends
who didn't take the dare.
How far from Italy, our 32nd Street
cement and asphalt. No tomatoes, eggplant,
basil, grapes. Rosie's mother's food's
my favorite now—farther back than yuppies,
marathoners, back down the cracked
pavement to Rosie's mother.
Rose at the sink rinsing dinner pasta,
a white apron over her flowered dress,
her dark curls twisting onto her brow,
our faces in the window going up in steam.
(Poems from WAKING STONE: INVENTIONS ON THE LIFE OF HARRIET HOSMER)
