mother, my journeying laborer
who wandered here, with me in her hobo
sack-I want to put her to sleep
like an exhausted animal. Sleep, baby,
Sleep. (183-4)
Olds possesses a keen sense of existence as not merely anthropocentric, but as pantheistic-that there is a divine force identifiable in everything, right down to the molecular level. Such phenomenological poems here include "Her Birthday As Ashes In Seawater," where her mother's ashes have been dispersed, leaving "her nature unknowable, dense, / dispersed, her atomization a miracle." (185) She is part of the sea and the sea is part of the galaxy and the galaxy is part of at least one of the universes. It's a reminder that when we scale up, anthropocentrism doesn't fare well.
"My Parents' Ashes (New York City, October, 2001)" returns the reader to the earlier poem written not long after 9/11, when the acrid dust of bones and buildings was still in the air, holding memory in place. It evokes an image of her parents' ashes dispersed 3000 miles away in the San Francisco Bay:
Maybe a molecule of her
has lain beside a molecule
of him, or interpenetrated
it, an element of her matter
bonding to an element of his
...
the currents carry them
back and forth under the Golden Gate. (202)
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