{"id":308,"date":"2011-10-04T00:06:02","date_gmt":"2011-10-04T04:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/?p=308"},"modified":"2011-10-04T00:06:02","modified_gmt":"2011-10-04T04:06:02","slug":"the-race-sharon-olds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/?p=308","title":{"rendered":"The Race – Sharon Olds"},"content":{"rendered":"

[audio:therace.mp3] (3:03)
\nread by Sharon Olds. audio from The Knopf National Poetry Month Collection<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
\nbought a ticket, ten minutes later
\nthey told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
\nhad said my father would not live through the night
\nand the flight was cancelled. A young man
\nwith a dark brown moustache told me
\nanother airline had a nonstop
\nleaving in seven minutes. See that
\nelevator over there, well go
\ndown to the first floor, make a right, you’ll
\nsee a yellow bus, get off at the
\nsecond Pan Am terminal, I
\nran, I who have no sense of direction
\nraced exactly where he’d told me, a fish
\nslipping upstream deftly against
\nthe flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
\nbags I had thrown everything into
\nin five minutes, and ran, the bags
\nwagged me from side to side as if
\nto prove I was under the claims of the material,
\nI ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
\nI who always go to the end of the line, I said
\nHelp me. He looked at my ticket, he said
\nMake a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
\nrun. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
\nat the top I saw the corridor,
\nand then I took a deep breath, I said
\ngoodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
\nI used my legs and heart as if I would
\ngladly use them up for this,
\nto touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
\nbags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
\nin skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
\nwomen running, their belongings tied
\nin scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
\nlong legs he gave me, my strong
\nheart I abandoned to its own purpose,
\nI ran to Gate 17 and they were
\njust lifting the thick white
\nlozenge of the door to fit it into
\nthe socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
\ntoo rich, I turned sideways and
\nslipped through the needle’s eye, and then
\nI walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
\nwas full, and people’s hair was shining, they were
\nsmiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
\nmist of gold endorphin light,
\nI wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
\nin massive relief. We lifted up
\ngently from one tip of the continent
\nand did not stop until we set down lightly on the
\nother edge, I walked into his room
\nand watched his chest rise slowly
\nand sink again, all night
\nI watched him breathe.<\/p>\n

from The Father<\/em> (1992)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[audio:therace.mp3] (3:03) read by Sharon Olds. audio from The Knopf National Poetry Month Collection. 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-lozenge-of-the-door"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=308"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308\/revisions\/310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}