Sharon Olds

While He Told Me

While he told me, I looked from small thing
to small thing in our room, the face
of the bedside clock, the sepia postcard
of a woman bending down to a lily.
Later, when we took off our clothes, I saw
his deep navel, and the cindery lichen
silk, between the male breasts, and from
outside the shower curtain's terrible membrane
I called out something like flirting to him
and he smiled. Before I turned out the light
he touched my face, then turned away,
then the dark. Then every scene I thought of
I visited accompanied by a death-spirit,
everything was chilled with it,
each time I woke I lay in dreading
bliss to feel and hear him sigh and
snore. Near sunrise, behind overcast, he got
up to go in and read on the couch,
as he often did,
and in a while I followed him,
as I often had,
and snoozed on him, while he read, and he laid
an arm across my back. When I opened
my eyes I saw two tulips stretched
away from each other extreme in the old
vase with the grotto carved out of a hill
and a person kneeling in it, praying. Around
the neck of the vase, its narrow sky,
were petioles, leaf-scars, pollen ashes,
pollen dust, as if I saw where he had been
living, my imagined shepherd in impermanent paradise.

My First Hour

That hour, I was most myself. I had shrugged
my mother slowly off, I lay there
taking my first breaths, as if
the air of the room was blowing me
like a bubble. All I had to do
was go out along the line of my gaze and back,
feeling gravity, silk, the
pressure of the air a caress, smelling on
myself her creamy blood. The air
was softly touching my skin and mouth,
entering me and drawing forth the little
sighs I did not know as mine.
I was not afraid. I lay in the quiet
and looked, and did the wordless thought,
my mind was getting its oxygen
direct, the rich mix by mouth.
I hated no one. I gazed and gazed,
and everything was interesting, I was
free, not yet in love, I did not
belong to anyone, I had drunk
no milk yet--no one had
my heart. I was not very human. I did not
know there was anyone else. I lay
like a god, for an hour, then they came for me
and took me to my mother.

Last Hour

In the middle of the night, I made myself a bed
on the floor, of oven-warmed hospital blankets,
aligning it true to my mother, head
to the hills, foot to the bay where the wading
shore birds forage for mollusks, I lay down
level, and the first death-rattle sounded
its desert authority in the room.
She had her look of a choirboy in a high
wind, but her face was matteryer,
as if her own personal tissues,
stored with the airs and fires of her life,
were being replaced from some general supply
of gels and rosins. Her body would breathe her,
life like a gift forced on us,
crackle and hearth-snap of mucous, and then
she would not breathe. Sometimes it seemed
it was not my mother, as if she'd been changelinged
with a being more suited to the labor than she,
a creature plainer and calmer, and yet
saturated with the yearning of my mother,
she would work for a ratcheted breath, and then
rest. Palm around the baby crown of her
scalp where her heart fierce beat, palm to her
tiny shoulder, I wondered her, and she
lost wonder right back at me,
and was still for a long time, and then
her poor, dear tongue, round, and
spotted with old manna spots
lifted, and a small gasp
was made in her mouth as if gently forced in,
then quiet. Then another sigh, sweet
and resigned, as if of relief, and then
peace. This went on for a while, as if she were
having out, in no hurry,
her last feelings about the earth,
her tender, sorrowing completion, and then in my
palm against her head the resolving gift of no
suffering, no heartbeat;
for moments, her lips seemed to curve up,
and then I felt she was not there,
I felt as if she had always wanted
to escape and now she had escaped. Then she turned,
slowly, to a golden thing of bone
marking where she had been. Later,
I kept going back to kiss the brow,
it did not seem a possible thing
for me to leave the building and she
not leave, like leaving a newborn alone
at home. The night air was black
and fresh and cold, and in the fog there shone,
muffled, the marguerite, the mother of
pearl moon.

---

Sharon Olds teaches in New York University's Graduate Creative Writing Program. The Unswept Room, her seventh book of poems, is due out from Knopf in November. contents | next