The next day, the day after,

by the time I carried it outside, my tremor

wiggled it, as if it were struggling—

and the mouse was caught in two traps, like a

valentine heart, so I lowered it into

a bucket, and put it on the porch step, and it

rained more, so I opened the traps and

dropped the carousel of worms

in the woods, the biggest larva the length of the

mouseling’s head. In quarantine

isolation, I’d had a thought

of you, my darling, and backed up from the thought:

if our corpses attracted necromancers

of comparable size to the mouse’s, my love would have

a Komodo dragon in his grave with him.

Oh my darling, forgive me, are you a skeleton

yet? 28 weeks, someone said, when it’s

above freezing. When you died, you arrived at the

feast table, and your throne, and after

the banquet, we went to your four-poster bed,

each post a tree—oak, beech,

hemlock, pine—and have been resting together

at the end of the festival. What’s strange to me

this morning, is that I think you still

love me, even though I’ve written this.

Love is the love of who we are, it is a form of knowing.

A Note About the Author

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford University and Columbia University. She is the recipient of the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement, as well as the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2012 collection, Stag’s Leap. She is the author of twelve previous books of poetry and the winner of other awards and honors, including the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first book, Satan Says (1980), and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her second, The Dead and the Living, which was also the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1983. The Father was short-listed for the T. S. Eliot Prize, and The Unswept Room was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Olds teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helped to found the NYU outreach programs, among them the writing workshop for residents of the former S. S. Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for the veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. She lives in New York City.

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