Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater | by: Sharon Olds

You sent this poem, and read it to me maybe after our second date. Yes, it was. I knew even then going into the date, I wanted to explain that my mother had died just 4 months prior. And I might cry spontaneously so you might want to leave and find an less complicated situation. I was living with my dad then and I took the bus in from Jersey. Oh, how I would savor the tidbits of messages. I think by this point we were strictly on a text messaging basis.

I remember sitting on the bus with my headphones, sitting on that stretched, stagnant morning pause between Rt. 3 and the Turnpike where the road turns only for commuter busses to snake along during rush hour traffic. Nothing was moving along in that traffic, but inside-- listening to you read this beautiful poem (more than a few times over), shy with the intimacy of a new voice close, but also wondering-- Who is this guy?

Toujours dans mon coeur, Christina

--

Her Birthday as Ashes in Seawater By Sharon Olds

By now, my mother has been pulled to the top of many small waves, carried in the curve that curls over, onto itself, and unknots, again, into the liquid plain, as her ions had been gathered from appearances and concepts. And her dividend, her irreducible, like violet down, thrown to the seals, starfish, wolf spiders on the edge-of-Pacific floor, I like to follow her from matter into matter, my little quester, as if she went to sea in a pea-green boat. Every separate bit, every crystal shard, seems to be here—her nature unknowable, dense, dispersed, her atomization a miracle, the earth without her a miracle as if I had arrived on my own with nothing to owe, nothing to grieve, nothing to fear, it would happen with me as it would, not one molecule lost or sent to the Principal or held in a dried-orange-pomander strongbox stuck with the iron-matron maces of the cloves. My mother is a native of this place, she is made of the rosy plates of the shell of one who in the silt of a trench plays music on its own arm, draws chords, and then the single note— rosin, jade, blood, catgut, siren-gut, hair, hair, hair—I miss her, I lack my mother, such peace there is on earth now every tooth of her head is safe, ground down to filaments of rock-crab fractals and claw facets, the whole color wheel burst and released. Oh Mom. Come sit with me at this stone table at the bottom of the Bay, here is a barnacle of egg custard, here is your tiny spoon with your initials, sup with me at dawn on your first day—we are all the dead, I am not apart from you, for long, except for breath, except for everything.