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In the course of almost three decades of a life documented and examined in poems, Sharon Olds has confronted the unsayable many times. Click to hear her read today's selection, "The Tending," which can be found in her collection The Unswept Room. The Tending My parents did not consider it, for me, yet I can see myself in the woods of some other world, with the aborted. It is early evening, the air is ashen as if from funeral-home chimneys, and there are beginnings of people almost growing—but not changing—on stalks, some in cloaks, or lady's-slippers, others on little trellises. Maybe I am one of the gardeners here, we water them with salt water. I recall the girl who had a curl right in the middle of her forehead, when she was good she was very very good, I was not like that, when she was bad she was horrid, I am here as if in a garden of the horrid—I move and tend, by attention, to the rows, I think of Mary Mary Quite Contrary and feel I am seeing the silver bells set down clapperless, the cockleshells with the cockles eaten. And yet this is a holy woods. When I think of the house I came to, and the houses these brothers and sisters might have come to, and what they might have done with what was done there, I wonder if some, here, have done, by their early deaths, a boon of absence to someone in the world. So I tend them, I hate for them to remain thankless. I do not sing to them—their lullaby long complete, I just walk, as if this were a kind of home, a mothers' and fathers' place, and I am among the sung who will not sing, the harmed who will not harm. TODAY'S AUDIO CLIP: Listen to a recording of Sharon Olds reading "The Tending." KEEP CLICKING: About UNSWEPT ROOM About Sharon Olds PLUS: ENTER TO WIN a copy of THE KNOPF NATIONAL POETRY MONTH COLLECTION Purchase a signed edition of W. S. Dipiero's CHINESE APPLES (please note delivery will take 2-3 weeks) If you're in the New York City area on April 16th, don't miss a special poetry month event at the Strand bookstore with Brad Leithauser and Paul Muldoon.     Excerpt from Unswept Room. Copyright © 2002 by Sharon Olds. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Audio excerpt copyright © 2006, 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. We welcome your feedback. Please send any thoughts or questions to knopfpoetry@randomhouse.com You received this issue because your email address is in Knopf's Poem-a-Day mailing list. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to unsub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com. Or if you received this poem as a forward and wish to subscribe, send a blank email to sub_knopfpoetry@info.randomhouse.com.