Sharon Olds has a time travel moment . . .
I Go Back to May 1937
by: Sharon Olds
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
I think everybody has experiences they would like to change. Car accidents avoided. College classes passed. High school crushes fucked. Family traumas healed. Regrets are as plentiful as dandelions in June.
Me? Today, I wish I could see my sister Rose one last time. Today would have been her birthday. (You already know this fact if you read last night's post.) I don't think I left things unsaid to her. It was impossible to leave her presence without saying "I love you" and giving her a hug.
The morning Rose died is kind of a blur. She hadn't been doing well for quite some time. In and out of the hospital the last year of her life. Her lungs were awful, and she kept getting bronchitis and pneumonia and double pneumonia. In fact, one of the things that lead to her death was a pneumothorax.
Yet, when she breathed her last breath (right after my daughter arrived to say goodbye to her), I almost didn't believe she'd died. She didn't struggle at the end. Her chest wasn't heaving. No rattle in her throat. She simply inhaled quietly and exhaled quietly, and that was it. So peaceful.
It's also the 139th anniversary of Emily Dickinson's death. So, even poetically, I'm being haunted by the past. I'm surrounded by ghosts today.
Saint Marty wrote a poem for tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:
On this day in 1886, Emily Dickinson died at the age of fifty-five. Imagine Emily Dickinson sitting next to you right now, dressed in white, and holding a book of poems. She reads quietly at your side. Write a poem about this scene or imagine you are writing a letter to Emily Dickinson. What do you want to tell her?
Ten Letter Fragments to Emily Dickinson
by: Martin Achatz
1.
Did you really hear a fly
when you died--battering
the window pane
like a horse trapped
in its stall while
the barn's burning down?
2.
Was white really
your favorite color,
or were you a moth
in a former life?
3.
I like being alone, too,
because I'm nobody
and don't care who
you are.
4.
I prefer "Stairway to Heaven"
over "Amazing Grace."
5.
Blind dates aren't
perfect, but a little
carriage ride never
killed anyone.
6.
"Hope" doesn't have feathers,
can't be trained to sit
on your shoulder, eat
crackers, whisper in your ear
the winning lottery numbers.
7.
Can you love the wrong
person? That's like asking
peepers whether they
really want to sing arias
to warm May mud.
8.
I'm going to tell
all the truth here:
that narrow fellow
you saw in the grass
was me.
9.
This morning, I felt
as if the top of my head
was taken off. It wasn't
poetry. It was the fifth
of gin I drank last night.
10.
I dwell in possibility,
too, because poets
think there's beauty
in everything, even
if it takes bloodhounds
to hunt it down.
