This morning I’m at home. My daughter is sick. My boys are off to school. I’ll go to get them later along with the carpool kids I’ve agreed to bring home. My girl and I indulged in a little Monk, her new favorite show, while I ate my oatmeal, leftover from the pot I made for the kids this weekend which only I ate then. I was meant to spend the day driving carpool and doing work, had looked forward to time in my favorite coffee shop, each time there feeling near the last, as my son will soon take over carpool driving and I’ll be home alone. Instead of working in the coffee shop, I try to work at home, can hardly pull myself away from my girl’s side. There have been so few days of her life when I stayed home just for her. She came to day care with me when she was days old. I’ve been working ever since. Hardly a day when she was sick was one I could take off.

I try to do my work, finish the dishes, sweep the floor, read the mail. On the dining room table on top of the mail there’s a bag of books I bought Tuesday evening on a visit to a basement used book store that’s becoming home, three volumes of poetry, culled from a whole shelf I perused, selected, returned, let go. The one I choose this morning is Sharon Olds, Wellspring. In it I find three poems to read by cracking the book open near the end. The three are lovely. I discipline myself to stop, so I can do my work, by telling myself that I’ll begin as soon as I’ve shared one here.

When I was writing about my kids growing up and needing a poem to say how it feels, this is what I meant. My oldest child is seventeen. Our work together this year is getting ready to say good-bye. We visit colleges. We register for SAT’s. We look at transcripts, fill out applications, consult about financial aid, talk with friends over dinner about colleges they think he’d like. I wish I could write a poem about Ben like Sharon Olds has written about her girl. Enjoy her words. Of course, they made me cry.

High School Senior (from The Wellspring)

For seventeen years, her breath in the house
at night, puff, puff, like summer
cumulus above her bed,
and her scalp smelling of apricots
–this being who had formed within me,
squatted like a bright tree-frog in the dark,
like an eohippus she had come out of history
slowly, through me, into the daylight,
I had the daily sight of her,
like food or air she was there, like a mother.
I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell
the difference between her leaving for college
and our parting forever–I try to see
this house without her, without her pure
depth of feeling, without her creek-brown
hair, her daedal hands with their tapered
fingers, her pupils dark as the mourning cloak’s
wing, but I can’t. Seventeen years
ago, in this room, she moved inside me,
I looked at the river, I could not imagine
my life with her. I gazed across the street,
and saw, in the icy winter sun,
a column of steam rush up away from the earth.
There are creatures whose children float away
at birth, and those who throat-feed their young
for weeks and never see them again. My daughter
is free and she is in me–no, my love
of her is in me, moving in my heart,
changing chambers, like something poured
from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.