readingss

The Planned Child

I hated the fact that they had planned me, she had taken

a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry

as if sliding the backbone up out of his body,

and made a chart of the month and put

her temperature on it, rising and falling,

to know the day to make me--I would have

liked to have been conceived in heat,

in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex,

not on cardboard, the little x on the

rising line that did not fall again.

But when a friend was pouring wine

and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,

I took the wine against my lips

as if my mouth were moving along

that valved wall in my mother's body, she was

bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then

bearing down, pressing me out into

the world that was not enough for her without me in it,

not the moon, the sun, Orion

cartwheeling across the dark, not

the earth, the sea--none of it

was enough, for her, without me.

Sharon Olds