The Unswept Room by Sharon Olds

Author:Sharon Olds [Olds, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54859-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2002-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Sleep Suite

To end up in an old hotel suite

with one’s nearly-grown children, who are sleeping, is a kind

of Eden. The one in the second bed

rests her head on two pillows—I did not know that—

as she sleeps. The one on the couch, under candlewick

chenille, has here and there as he turns

the stuffed animal his sister just gave him

for his twentieth birthday. I roam in the half-

dark, getting ready for bed, I stalk

my happiness. I’m like someone from the past

allowed to come back, I am with our darlings,

they are dreaming, safe. Perhaps it’s especially like

Eden since this is my native coast,

it smells something like my earliest life,

fog, plumeria, eucalyptus, it is

broken, the killership of my family—

it is stopped within me, the complex gear

that translated its motion. When I turn out the light and lie

down, I feel as if I’m at the apex

of a triangle, and then, with a Copernican

swerve, I feel that the apex is my daughter,

and then my son, I am that background figure, that

source figure the mother. We are not,

strictly speaking, mortal. We cast

beloveds into the future. I fall

asleep, briefly living forever

in the room with our son and daughter.

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