The Last Hour — Sharon Olds
In the middle of the night, I made myself a bed
on the floor, aligning it true to my mother,
head to the hills, foot to the Bay where the
wading birds forage for mollusks—I lay
down, and the first death-rattle sounded
Its desert authority. She had her
look of a choirboy in high wind,
but her face had become matteryer,
As if her tissues, stored with her life,
were being replaced from some general supply
of gels and rosins. Her body would breathe her,
crackle and hearth-snap of mucus, and then
she would not breathe. Sometimes it seemed
it was not my mother, as if she’d been changelinged
with a being more suited to labor than she,
a creature plainer and calmer, and yet
saturated with the yearning of my mother.
Palm around the infant crown of her
scalp where her heart fierce beat, palm to her
tiny shoulder, I held even with her,
and then she began to go more quickly,
to draw ahead, then she was still and her
tongue, spotted with mama spots,
lifted, and a gasp was made in her mouth,
as if forced in, then quiet. Then another
sigh, as if of relief, and then
peace. This went on for a while, as if she were
having out, in no hurry,
her feelings about this place, her tender
sorrowing completion, and then, against my
palm to her head, the resolving gift of no
suffering, no heartbeat;
for moments, her lips seemed to curve up—
and then I felt she was not there,
I felt as if she had always wanted
to escape and now she had escaped. Then she turned,
slowly, to a thing of bone,
marking where she had been.
