<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width: auto; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; position: static; z-index: auto; "><tbody><tr><td valign="top" class="td1"><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="t1" style="width: 540px; position: static; z-index: auto; "><tbody><tr><td valign="top" class="td2"><br><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" class="t2" style="width: 540px; position: static; z-index: auto; "><tbody><tr><td valign="middle" class="td2"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">High School Senior</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><br></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td valign="top" class="td2"><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" style="width: auto;"><tbody><tr><td valign="middle" class="td3"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">For seventeen years, her breath in the house<br>at night, puff, puff, like summer<br>cumulus above her bed,<br>and her scalp smelling of apricots<br>— this being who had formed within me,<br>squatted like a wide-eyed tree-frog in the night,<br>like an eohippus she had come out of history<br>slowly, through me, into the daylight,<br>I had the daily sight of her,<br>like food or air she was there, like a mother.<br>I say “college,” but I feel as if I cannot tell<br>the difference between her leaving for college<br>and our parting forever — I try to see<br>this apartment without her, without her pure<br>depth of feeling, without her creek-brown<br>hair, her daedal hands with their tapered<br>fingers, her pupils brown as the mourning cloak's<br>wing, but I can't. Seventeen years<br>ago, in this room, she moved inside me,<br>I looked at the river, I could not imagine<br>my life with her. I gazed across the street,<br>And saw, in the icy winter sun,<br>a column of steam rush up away from the earth.<br>There are creatures whose children float away<br>at birth, and those who throat-feed their young for<br>weeks and never see them again. My daughter<br>is free and she is in me — no, my love<br>of her is in me, moving in my heart,<br>changing chambers, like something poured<br>from hand to hand, to be weighed and then reweighed.</div></td></tr></tbody></table><br><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Sharon Olds</td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table><div><br></div></body></html>