One Secret Thing
Page 6
wading birds forage for mollusks—I lay
down, and the first death-rattle sounded
its desert authority She had her
look of a choirboy in a high wind,
but her face had become matteryer,
as if her tissues, stored with her life,
were being replaced from some general supply
of gels and rosins. Her body would breathe her,
crackle and hearth-snap of mucus, 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.
Palm around the infant crown of her
scalp where her heart fierce beat, palm to her
tiny shoulder, I held even with her,
and then she began to go more quickly,
to draw ahead, then she was still and her
tongue, spotted with manna spots,
lifted, and a gasp was made in her mouth,
as if forced in, then quiet. Then another
sigh, as if of relief, and then
peace. This went on for a while, as if she were
having out, in no hurry,
her feelings about this place, her tender
sorrowing completion, and then, against my
palm to 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 thing of bone,
marking where she had been.
To See My Mother
It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone. If she hadn’t looked so exalted, so
beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly
hopeful, more than hopeful—beyond
hope, relieved—if she had not been suffering so
much, since I had met her, I do not
know how I would have stood it, without
fighting someone, though no one was there
to fight, death was not there except
as her, my task was to hold her tiny
crown in one cupped hand, and her near
birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,
nests. Winds, stems, tongues.
Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,
my mother’s dying was like an end
of life on earth, some end of water
and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,
till only that still, ocher moon
shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.
When I Left Her
I remember the parting as if she had been
a gilded balsa crucifix, not
4’ 11” but four and eleven-twelfths
inches, like a pale rattle a baby
could hold in her hand. Sometimes I look back and it’s as
if I left a scepter lying
in the hospice bed, or a dowser of my mother,
but it was her body—although someone,
when my back had been turned, had laid her out
at parade rest,
her fleshless paws folded across her
goddess gate—pussycat,
where have you been? When I left her, she was at
stiff attention, beginning to warp
like outer space at its outer limits.
Feet start walking, something told
my feet, everyone was leaving, and I
deserted her, I will not let thee
go except thou bless me. Of course she had
blessed me—but while my legs went scissor-soft-
scissor, so that the butter walls
were melting past me, I could not count
my blessings, the feet that had stroked inside her
were being conveyed by the galilee floor toward the
door into night. It was like walking
away from someone who is drowning in inches
of water—and I’d bent beside her, and called to the
morphine to drown her, she had lain face up in the
cloud of it lowered like a pool to her face.
It was time. It was past midnight, the air of the
quiet town was wild with fresh salt
sea and pine. Never again.
Always. Never again. Always.
Western Wind
Blowing from the Pacific—that pattern
piece of the globe’s blue dress—blowing
from the Occident waters, from the Bay, from the tide flats,
the willet, heron, reed, mussel,
scallop, fault—at overcast dawn,
the western wind is bringing small,
dark clouds, up the slope
to the coastal hills dense with calcium
fog, and I wonder if any of the little
puffs is the smoke of my mother’s flesh, from
the downwind crematorium
where her body lies this morning. When I saw it
last, it had diminished and hardened down
from what, at the end, had appeared to have become
a little singing sea on little
sea legs. The longer her body was dead,
the more it petrified—elkhorn,
kindling. This morning it bursts into High
C’s of flame, this morning the complex
pastoral scene—nymph, trailing
diaphan, ibis, rill, pearl—
the solar system of my mother, the beauty of her
orbs, is fed, feet or head
first, into the Shadrach Meshach
Abednego, there to be divided
in two, the bed of gentle ash
rough with shards, radius and molars,
and the genies of buttery vapor, the fume
spirits—torn right through, in places,
showing the veery-egg blue—flying
slowly, low, up over the hills
on their way to the ice fields.
Satin Maroon
In the narrow office on Shattuck and Ashby,
the woman pulled open a file drawer,
low tumble of wheels on rails,
and took out the ashes, in a satin maroon
plastic box, and set them on the desk.
Next of kin, I signed, and lifted them
up, and in the car I clasped her
tight, my arms seemed encircled around
the container twice, three times. Then I held her
up to my ear, and tilted her,
to hear whatever I could hear of her,
shirr of wisdom-teeth, of kiln bed
grit, dry mince like the crab-claws that she would
shuck to give us the brine-meat—gravel
rustle. The minister opened the chapel,
we set her where she’d always sat,
we put a rose beside her like
a petticoat. Then there she was,
on the sequoia pew, a magenta carton of
mortar-and-pestled bones. That it should
come to this. I kissed the smooth
surface, under which her silver
constellations turned, and then it was
time to leave her, overnight,
as we had planned, but it was hard to leave her
by herself, but suddenly, I saw
she had always been alone—fatherless,
mismothered—and n
ot without her own
valiant spirit. And I wished she could descant
all night, as if this were she, this rattle of
salty campfire rubble from inside her,
and I left her there, I relinquished her
to the strangeness, the still home, of matter.
Nereid Elegy
Early in the morning, we went through her garden,
filling bags with sempervirens,
sequoia, cedar, sugar pine, larch,
tearing each blown rose off its core,
dropping in cones, tiny lemons,
gardenia knobs, and the minister said,
Blessed are the Dead who Die in the Lord,
for they Rest from their Labors,
and we took the pint of her hearth-fluff to the Bay and cast
off into the fog. Cormorant, pelican,
tern, egret, whimbrel, we took her past
cliff and scoured-out tide tunnel,
staying in the lee of the mouth, and then we came
out, into chop and swell, like a rearing
horse on a heavy-seas carousel,
the boat was toward the open sea,
I pressed her square bucket of cinders
against my belly, the engine cut,
the prow swung slow around, the wind
dropped, and someone said, It’s time.
And then I knew I was about to lose her,
she was going, there was no stopping it,
and it bent me over, Give Rest, O Christ,
to thy Servant, with thy Saints,
where Sorrow and Pain are no more, nor Sighing—
he held the box to me, and my mother
was violet-gray, she was blue spruce,
twilight, fur, I ran my hand into the
evening talcum of her absent action, and there
came, sharp up, with shards, and powders,
a tangle of circles soldered together,
the triple-strand wedding ring
from her finger touched me, now, on the other
side of the fire. I held it a moment
and then I loosed it overboard
in its damp puff of her parted flesh,
which blew in a cloud of starshine, and plunged
like milk into the water. Dust thou Art, and unto
Dust shalt thou Return, and he shook
the rest of her out, We Commit her Body
to the Deep. And we took the sack of blossoms and we
reached in, dropping brightness and limp
buoyant alloys in a trail above where her
rusts and corrids had gone, we laid down
a fresh path, we let her go,
we ushered her forth, like the death of a god,
the birth of an exhausted holiday.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sharon Olds was born in 1942, in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her first book, Satan Says (1980), received the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award. Her second, The Dead and the Living (1984), was both the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983 and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Father (1992) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize in England. The Unswept Room (2002) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Sharon Olds was the New York State Poet from 1998 to 2000. She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and was one of the founders of the NYU workshop program at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island in New York. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.