Still Life in Landscape

Olds, Sharon

It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars

and half-cars, strewn, it was still, and bright,

a woman was lying on the highway, on her back,

with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders

so the back of her head touched her spine

between her shoulder-blades, her clothes

mostly accidented off, and her

leg gone, a long bone

sticking out of the stub of her thigh

this was her abandoned matter,

my mother grabbed my head and turned it and

clamped it into her chest, between

her breasts. My father was driving-not sober

but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of

neutral twilight, broken glass

on wet, black, macadam, like a

night fierce with stars. This was

the world-maybe the only one.

The dead woman was not the person

my father had recently almost run over,

who suddenly leapt away from our family

car, jerking back from death,

she was not I, she was not my mother,

but maybe she was a model of the mortal,

the elements ranged around her on the tar

glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.

Pioneering poet — The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes edited by Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel