The Sign of Saturn - Sharon Olds

Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an

amber black look, like my father

about to pass out from disgust, and I remember

she was born under the sign of Saturn,

the father who ate his children. Sometimes

the dark, silent back of her head

reminds me of him unconscious on the couch

every night, his face turned away.

Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother

with that coldness that passed for reason in him,

that anger hardened by will, and when she rages

into her room, and slams the door,

I can see his vast blank back

when he passed out to get away from us

and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,

to coal. Sometimes I see that coal

ignite in her eyes. As I talk to her,

trying to persuade her toward the human, her little

clear face tilts as if she can

not hear me, as if she were listening

to the blood in her own ear, instead,

her grandfather’s voice.