Red Room Where the Writers Are

Summer Solstice, New York City By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it, he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building and over the soft, tarry surface to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice and said if they came a step closer that was it. Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life, the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening, and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a black shell around his own life, life of his children's father, in case the man was armed, and one, slung with a rope like the sign of his bounden duty, came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head, and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die. The tallest cop approached him directly, softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking, while the man's leg hung over the lip of the next world and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the hairy net with its implacable grid was unfolded near the curb and spread out and stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive at a birth. Then they all came a little closer where he squatted nest to his death, his shirt glowing its milky glow like something growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then everything stopped as his body jerked and he stepped down from the parapet and went toward them and they closed on him, I thought they were going to beat him up, as a mother whose child has been lost will scream at the child when it's found, they took him by the arms and held him up and leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the tall cop lit a cigarette in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and then they all lit cigarettes, and the red, glowing ends burned like the tiny campfires we lit at night back at the beginning of the world.

The Race

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a nonstop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you'll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he'd told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit it into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle's eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people's hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.

                          Sharon Olds