Sunday Scribblings--Google Magic (Anne Sexton)

Photograph taken by Rollie McKenna

This was a difficult prompt for me this week, as I'm someone who obsessively researchs anything that strikes my fancy. So how to think of something new to dive into? But I managed to think of a poet who has always interested me, and yet I knew nothing about her. Well, a little Google Magic fixed that.

So I wanted to write a bit of a mythic "soul biography" for her--Anne Sexton.

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Once upon a time there was a girl, for they were all girls back then--these women who stood stiff in crinolines with eyes that laughed hard through curls. This girl wore her beauty like normalcy, like a mask of grins. But her greatest gift was her way of seeing around corners and through the cement of society’s placid main streets, endless in their sameness. She could see the shadows at the core of everyone’s bones, the tales told hushed around so many kitchen tables. She sat, fearless, in a scene of dozy domesticity, and wrote her jagged lightening strike poems as her daughters patted dollies down for noontime naps.

Felled, and felled, and felled by depression relentlessly dragging at her guts and filling her lungs with coalsmoke despair--she tore herself open on the page, spilling forth her base confessions and her truth-giving voice to her woman’s life with its blood and messy yearnings--saying, "yes, this is important, your life, even you who have no education, who have no power...this can also be a voice, your experience. You can also be heard." She searched and found a tribe of listeners, muses, teachers and the taught--groups that fed her even as home life left her empty.

Soon she was toasted and celebrated by a world fascinated and caught up in her. She tried to use her words like bricks to wall off her depressions, sought therapy to make peace. But none of the accolades centered her as her life force scattered like so many dead Boston leaves. She drank, took lovers, obsessed, and fell into trances. Nothing brought relief.

Finally the girl sighed and breathed deep, but it was not air around her. And she was no more.

But like all good fairy tales, this one stretches back into hazy time and forward into all of our tomorrows. Because this girl pulled back her mask, because she grew too fierce and alive and prophetic for it, because she had to chant her truth loudly--she left her words. And those words are you, and they are me, and they are anyone who sheds her skin again and again at the kitchen table, lit by a fluorescent bulb of hope.

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

From "Her Kind" by Anne Sexton
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