by Sharon Olds
in a tide pool beside my hand. I think
I had thought I would falter if I forgave my mother,
as if, then, I would lose her—and I do
feel lonely, now, to sense her beside me,
as if she is only a sister. And yet,
though I hear her sighs close by my ear,
my mother is in front of me somewhere, at a distance,
moving slowly toward the end of her life,
the shore of the eternal—she is solitary,
a woman alone, out ahead
of everyone I know, scout of the mortal, heart
breaking into solo.
3. The Ecstatic
On her first antidepressant, my mother
is adorable. Like many of us, she’s not
interested in much except herself, but these
days she’s more happily interested
in herself. Now I think of those years with her
as the Middle Ages, before morphine.
We could have just put something in her food!
like a Rose Fairy Book potion. Yes, I
wanted her to put me first, I wanted
to draw out
Leviathan
with an hook. But I sensed the one under
the one under the spell—this one,
the child who was in there to be tinkered down to.
She’s had her fitting for the MedicAlert,
“I’ve got it on, I’m all dingus’d up,
I knew you would want to know that I’m all
hooked up!” She is happy that I want to know,
and proud of wearing a little transmitter—not
unlike being an opera singer—
a link to those who wish her pleasure and long
life. Oh I have my mother on a leash.
Where wast thou, when I laid the foundations of the earth?
When the morning stars sang together?
I was there, with my mother.
4. Two Late Dialogues
Mom as Comet
How do they know that it won’t decide
to turn and come this way?! my mother,
at 82, points out. They think
they’re soooo clever, giving it that funny
name no one can remember, but how do they
know that whatever’s behind it wont suddenly
aim it at us? It’s big, I mean
It’s Oh-ho-HO! I see, I said,
yes … You think someone’s running it? Not
SOMEONE, she scathed, not a person: a force,
a nameless force! But she could see that I did not
get it, that inhuman powers,
out of control, can kill you. So my mom,
who used to sleep with masking tape
stuck to her brow, to prevent wrinkles,
transmogrified her face, and became—
by slewing her mouth this way and that,
and rolling her eyes, and letting her head
wobble as her shoulders swayed back and forth
—Hale-Bopp. She looked like a comic actor
doing a drunk, she looked like a tough
kid on a corner, amusing the others,
a person with an identity,
who could play, enacting her own wild mother
veering toward her, or her father, falling
to his accidental death, or my father
lurching at her, or the wave of death
toppling her second husband, or her own
death, somewhere, its maw pulling
from side to side, its eyes unfocused,
hurtling toward her, an error, a horror—all
mimed with reckless energy, to astound and delight me.
Her Creed
I believe
in the creation of
the criminal,
the evil people,
my mother says on her eighty-third birthday,
everyone born is a miracle.
How did I know I would have YOU, she
cries out. “I don’t know what I would have done
without you, Mom,” I say, “I’d still
be out there, calling MA-ma, MA-ma!”
She laughs with delight. But she’s worried about cloning—
“When they clone you, Mom,” I tell her,
“I want one.” I’ll put you on the list, she says.
“I want the little kind, that I can
put in a high chair and feed Cream of Wheat to,”
I add, and she says, I’ll move your name
up high on the list. Over and over,
these days, she tells me they never will be able
to assemble real flesh, in a dish, not flesh
with spirit—the men cannot make happen
what happened in her body. When she dies, she wants to see
her father again, and put her arms
around her second husband. Not a living
cell with a soul. Oh—but Science,
she sighs, you know—20,000
Leagues Under the Sea! “Let’s come back
and check on them,” I propose. “On your birthday,
in the year 3000, I’ll pick you up,
and we’ll visit this planet.” What will you be driving?
she asks. “A goose,” I tell my mother.
“I’ll honk.” Shave and a haircut, she says.
They will never make flesh.
5. Warily, Sportsman!
Now the vast dusk bulk that is the whale’s bulk …
it seems mine,
Warily, sportsman! though I lie so sleepy and
sluggish, my tap is death.
—“The Sleepers,” Walt Whitman
When she talks about caring for her beloved husband
after his stroke, I hold the phone
in the crook of my shoulder, where the heads of sleeping
infants have rested. She goes over the heartaches
again, the setbacks, the bad nurse—
the one who was not professional,
who did not understand he was not
responsible for the things he said about her
race and about her neighborhood.
Suddenly, my mother bursts out,
And my therapist says it COULDN’T have been my
kicking him, the night before,
that caused the stroke. “Of course not,”
I say, “of course not. You, uh,
kicked him?” He was sitting on the couch,
we were fighting about which cruise to take next, I could
TELL how small the staterooms were
by the plan of the windows, but HE wanted to go
to RUSSIA, I kicked him in the shin with my soft
sneaker. And my doctor says that it had NOTHING
to do with the stroke or the cancer. I agree,
but a week later I stop short
on the street: my mother is still hitting and kicking people?
I know that soft sneaker. But when
she married again, I thought she’d stop hitting.
Or do people hit and kick each other
a lot, does everyone do it? Does each
family have its lineage
of pugilists? No one hit her back
until today—by-blow of this page,
coldcock to her little forehead.
6. Little End Ode
When I told my mother the joke—the new kid
at college who asked where the library’s at,
and the sophomore who said, “At Yale, we do not
end our sentences with prep-
ositions,” whereupon the frosh said, “Oh,
I beg your pardon, where’s the library
at, asshole”—she shrieked with delight.
Asshole, she murmured fondly. She’s become
so fresh, rinsed with sweetness, as if she is
music, the strings especially high and bright.
She says it and sighs wit
h contentment, as if she has
finally talked back to her own mother.
Or maybe it is the closest she has come,
for a while, to the rich, animal life
she lived with her second husband—now
I can see that of course she touched him everywhere,
as lovers do. She touched me there,
you know, courteously, with oil
like myrrh; soon after she had given me life
she gave me pleasure, which gave her pleasure,
maybe it felt to her fingertip like the
complex, clean knot of her Fire Girls
tie-clasp. She seems, these days, like a very
human goddess. I do not want her
to die. This feels like a new not-want,
a shalt-not-want not-want. As soon as I
dared, around fifty, I called her, to myself,
the A-word. And yet, now, if she goes,
when she goes, to me it is like the departure of a
whole small species of singing bird from the earth.
7. Something Is Happening
When it approaches, no one knows what it is—it is her
brain tumor, flaring up again.
My mother explains it to me—Something
is happening, and it is physical,
and medical, and emotional,
and spiritual. She’s so sheerly lonely
she is like the one member of a tribe.
When she hears the doorbell—when it has not rung—
and she runs to it, she is like an explorer
of unseen deserts, unscanned rivers of
asteroids. Her naked body is almost
pretty, with its thousand puckers, maybe there’s a
planet somewhere which holds this beaten-to-
soft-peaks egg-white stomach the most
desirable. It was painful to know her,
such a feral one, untrained, unmothered,
but now she is playing at the edge of some field,
absorbed. There is something big coming,
bigger than love, bigger than aloneness.
She’s staying up all night for it.
Something not an angel, not male or female,
is leaning on her brain. Up from within
the crease of the tumor, like the first appearance
of matter, something is arriving—not
her father, and not just death, but the truth,
her self, soon to be completed.
8. Cassiopeia
Just before dawn, the fixed stars
stand over my mother’s house,
and the queen’s throne seems to set
as the earth turns away from it.
But my mother is at her zenith—every
hour or so, these days, she stops talking,
and lets me have a turn, she squinches her
face like a child concentrating, she
knows this custom is important. Then
she is off again, on her long carouse
across the sky. There are two new
people who worship her. Well I worship you
myself, I say, for your good work
with the young musicians, and she says in her new
voice, Well I worship you right back.
Then she tells me the tumor may be growing again,
she has me finger the side of her radiant
visionary childhood face, to feel,
in the dent of her temple, the earth rising,
coming for her. She tells me her dream in which her
late husband, pissing in the goldfish
pool, turns toward her, laughing. She laughs,
her head thrown back, her hard palate
an arc, her curls gleaming like the moonlit
lake bush of an ancient Venus.
She was not meant to be a mother,
she never got to be a child until now—
I feel I am back in an early time,
when people were being tried out, combinations
of flowers, and animals, and hinges of iron,
and wheeling desire, and longing. I feel
like an old shepherd on a hill. My lamb,
who sickened so long, my first lamb, is gamboling.
PART FIVE: One Secret Thing
Still Life
At moments almost thinking of her, I was
moving through the still life museum when my mother had her
stroke. I was with the furled leeks, I was
in the domain of the damp which lines
the chestnut hide, of dew on snails,
of the sweated egg, and the newts quick
and the newts gone over on their backs, and the withered
books—she was teaching someone, three
time zones away, to peel and slice
a banana, in the one correct way,
and I was wandering ruins of breakfasts,
broken crusts of a blackberry pie,
the leg of the paper wasp on it done
with a one-thread brush, in oil which had
ground gold in it. She had alerted me,
from the start, to objects, she had cried out
in pain, from their beauty, the way a thing
stood for the value of a spirit, an orange
trailing from its shoulders the stole of its rind,
the further from the tree, the more thinged and dried—
my mother was a place, a crossroads, she held the
banana and lectured like a child professor on its
longitudes and divisible threes,
she raised her hands to her temples, and held them,
and screamed, and fell to her bedroom floor, and I
wandered, calm, among oysters, and walnuts,
mice, apricots, coins, a golden
smiling skull, even a wild flayed
hare strung up by one foot like a dancer
leaping. There are things I will never know
about love. I strolled, ignorant
of my mother, among the tulips, beetle in its
holy stripes, she lay there and I walked
blind through music.
One Secret Thing
One secret thing happened
at the end of my mother’s life, when I was
alone with her. I knew it should happen—
I knew someone was there, in there,
something less unlike my mother than
anything else on earth. And the jar
was there on the table, the space around it
pulled back from it, like the awestruck handmade
air around the crèche, and her open
mouth was parched. It was late. The lid
eased off. I watched my finger draw through
the jelly, its egg-sex essence, the four
corners of the room were not creatures, were not
the four winds of the earth, if I did not
do this, what was I—I rubbed the cowlick of
petrolatum on the skin around where the
final measures of what was almost not
breath swayed, and her throat made a guttural
creek bed sound, like pebbly relief. But each
lip was stuck by chap to its row
of teeth, stuck fast. And then I worked
for my motherhood, my humanhood, I
slid my forefinger slowly back and
forth, along the scab-line and underlying
canines and incisors, upper lip and then
lower lip, until, like a basted
seam, softly ripped, what had been
joined was asunder, I ran the salve in-
side the folds, along the gums,
common mercy. The secret was
how deeply I did not want to touch
inside her, and how much the act
was an act of escape, my last chance
to free myself.
The Last Evening
Then we raised
the top portion of the bed,
and her head was like a trillium, growing
up, out of the ground, in the woods,
eyes closed, mouth open,
and we put the Battle arias on, and when I
heard the first note, that was it, for me,
I excused myself from the death-room guests,
and went to my mother, and cleared a place
on the mattress, beside her arm, lifting
the tubes, oxygen, dextrose, morphine,
dipping in under them, and letting them
rest on my hair, as if burying myself
under a topsoil of roots, I pulled
the sheet up, over my head,
and touched my forehead and nose and mouth
to her arm, and then, against the warm
solace of her skin, I sobbed full out,
unguarded, as I have not done near her;
and I could feel some barrier between us dissolving,
I could feel myself dissolving it,
moving ever-closer to her through it, till I was
all there. And in her coma nothing
drew her away from giving me the basal
kindness of her presence. When the doctor came in,
he looked at her and said, “I’d say
hours, not days.” When he left, I ate
a pear with her, talking us through it,
and walnuts—and a crow, a whole bouquet
of crows came apart, outside the window.
I looked for the moon and said, I’ll be right
back, and ran down the hospital hall,
and there, outside the eastern window,
was the waxing gibbous, like a swimmer’s head
turned to the side half out of the water, mouth
pulled to the side and back, to take breath,
I could see my young mother, slim
and strong in her navy one-piece, and see,
in memory’s dark-blue corridor,
the beauty of her crawl, the hard, graceful
overhand motion, as someone who says,
This way, to the others behind. And I went back,
and sat with her, alone, an hour,
in the quiet, and I felt, almost, not
afraid of losing her, I was so
content to have her beside me, unspeaking,
unseeing, alive.
Last Hour
In the middle of the night, I made myself a bed
on the floor, aligning it true to my mother,
head to the hills, foot to the Bay where the