Sharon Olds, "Easter, 1960"

The doctor on the phone was young, maybe on his
first rotation in the emergency room.
On the ancient boarding-school radio,
in the attic hall, the announcer had given my
boyfriend’s name as one of two
brought to the hospital after the sunrise
service, the egg hunt, the crash—one of them
critical, one of them dead. I was looking at the
stairwell bannisters, at their lathing,
the necks and knobs like joints and bones,
the varnish here thicker here thinner—I had said
Which one of them died, and now the world was
an ant’s world, the huge crumb of each
second to be thrown, somehow, up onto
my back—and the young, tired voice
said my fresh love’s name. It would have been
nice to tear out the balusters, and rail, and the
stairs, like a big backbone out of a
mastodon, to take some action,
to do, and do, and do, as a done-to, and
dear one to a done-to-death-to—to run, on a
treadmill, all night, and light the dorm,
the entire school, with my hate of fate,
and blow its wiring, and the town’s wiring,
pull the wires of Massachusetts
out of the switchboard of the country. I went back to my
room, I did not know how to get
out of the world, or how to stay—
I sat on the floor with a Sunday Times
and read the columns of the first page down,
and then the next, and then the next.
I can still see how every “a”
looked eager—it hadn’t heard, yet, that its
boy was gone—and every “f”
hung down its head on its broken neck,
its little arms held out, as if to
say, You see me, this is what I am.


Sharon Olds