I was going out the back door of the hall,
into the sugar pine evening air,
after my talk on family
and poetry. Someone had asked
a question about loyalty
and decency. And up until
this moment, alone now, out in the cold
conifer night, I had never considered
apologizing to my mother or father—
when up from my chest a warbly voice
began to say, “I am so sorry,”
my hand went up to cover my mouth, “I am
so sorry,” my knees were like
a very old person’s. As they moved me slow-motion toward the
foot of the mountain, I could see my parents at the
moments of their deaths—years apart,
but at this moment together—in the arms of the
child they trusted with their breath, who behind their
backs, in plain sight, sang them. The mountain was
dust-soft, timberline bright,
easy with oncoming distant night,
I started to walk up into it,
over the crumble of granite and evening
primrose, a marmot tooth, ants who had
fainted, mating, bluebird-down—I heard
their child, abjectly apologizing
for herself—and then my throat growled,
at them, “But you beat her up, you tied her
up,” but there it was, around and
above me, the hard, beautiful earth,
dressed in petals and needles, wings and
little separated feet, left
with the fur, uneaten, flesh turned
to another’s flight. Thank you for my life,
I said, help me to make something good
of it, my face a washed plate,
a sea-level dish, a sea-food platter, little
bent shins and shelled bellies—a
tidepool, on which they had rested some of
their last gazes. I held to them now,
among strangers. What had been done
to them, which had been unsayable,
by them, but do-able to me, had been,
for me, sayable, of them, undoable
to my own young, in the same way—
except in alphabet effigy—
and we knew this was an improvement, my father
and mother, and me,
together up the summer mountain,
on holiday.
—Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds’s most recent book, Balladz (2022), was published by Knopf. Her first book, Satan Says, was reissued as a forty-fifth anniversary edition in 2025.