Not many of my own words today, and besides, today’s poem is by Sharon Olds, and how could I possibly compete with that?
Taken from the Knopf site; direct link below.
Sharon Olds, in her poems across the decades, has carried us through many of her life’s passages, as well as those of her growing children — their milestones are both part of her story and then not, as she sees them emerge into their own separate narratives. Today’s poem ushers us thoughtfully into graduation season, with its partings that are also new beginnings.
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High School Senior
For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
— this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever — I try to see
this apartment without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils brown as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
And saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for
weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me — no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.
~ Sharon Olds
Music by Linda Rondstadt, “Long, Long Time” (best copy I could find)
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