heaven to be unhurtable

.

When I’d picture my death, I would be lying on my back,

and my spirit would rise to my belly-skin and out

like a sheet of wax paper the shape of a girl, furl

over from supine to prone and like the djinn’s

carpet begin to fly, low,

over our planet—heaven to be

unhurtable, and able to see without

cease or stint or stopperage,

to lie on the air, and look, and look,

not so different from my life, I would be

sheer with an almost not sore loneless,

looking at the earth as if seeing the earth

were my version of having a soul. But then

I could see my beloved, sort of standing

beside a kind of door in the sky—

not the door to the constellations,

to the pentangles, and borealis,

but a tidy flap at the bottom of the door in the

sky, like a little cat-door in the door,

through which is nothing. And he is saying to me that he must

go, now, it is time. And he does not

ask me, to go with him, but I feel

he would like me with him. And I do not think

it is a living nothing, where nonbeings

can make a kind of unearthly love, I

think it’s the nothing kind of nothing, I think

we go through the door and vanish together.

What depth of joy to take his arm,

pressing it against my breast

as lovers do in a formal walk,

and take that step.


—Sharon Olds 

.

First Breath

.

As soon as she is born—she,
he—the moment the newborn breathes
for the first time, taking, from the general
supply, some air, pulling it down
half her length, into the base of the
lobe which had first existed as a mattery
idea, and then had become the folded
lung, which lay in blue wait;
as soon as the sky
is drawn in, like a
petal expanding, in fast motion,
opening into the new being—
oxygen, where it had never been,
taking the neonate’s bluish shade
back into the empyrean;
as soon as she’s taken the good of one breath,
and given back the rest—look,
she is dying. I mean she is living—for a time,
maybe ninety years—but she
is on her way, now, to that ending.
She had never died at all, until now,
never before been offered the human work.


—Sharon Olds

.