Breaking It Off (Poem)

Breaking It Off 

Letter from Anne Sexton

It is not enough
I have waited, a woman
with her knees bent to the dawn?

I slept with your promises, too,
welcomed them like I did
the slit of your eye on my back.

I celebrated with an empty nightgown
in a bed too big for two,
seclusion the gift of Lucky Strikes,
my vodka my booze.

Like a madman afflutter I nursed
nightmares in my arms,
rocked them to sleep, baby,
picked at their meaning
till my knuckles bled.

Your name hoarse in my throat,
I swallowed whole days
woven of hunches, hard-guessed
the rumors delivered in pieces.

God, you can be so cold.

When you needed oxygen,
I buried my lips
in your good right hand,
our habit of words never easy.

You covered my eyes
with your insistent kiss
and still I could see
I was losing you.

Tonight I get to watch
the pall of roses
failing at my window.

© 2010 Maureen E. Doallas
__________________________

More years ago than I care to recall, I, along with many others, mostly women, were reading lots of Sylvia Plath (one of my college instructors was a poet deep into Plath), Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell, plus John Berryman and, oddly, considering this group, e.e. cummings. Some of us even were required to try out these poets' voices as our own. There was a lot of bad poetry then, too. 

The version of a poem I wrote at the time, I abandoned to a box of college papers, which I indulge in re-reading every so often, trying to measure from where I've come. Last fall, I redrafted the poem and put it away again.

When my friend Glynn at Faith, Fiction, Friends recently posted "I Hear America Singing, Still",  I decided to pull the poem out again and revise it once more for this week's "Random Acts of Poetry: What Poem Do You Come From?" at High Calling Blogs. I don't know that this new version satisfies Marcus' definition of ekphrasis (see the comments section of the RAP post); it is less a comment about any particular poem of Sexton's than an effort to reflect something of her so-called confessional style (she could write some terrific poetry, by the way). Nor would I go so far as to admit that reading Sexton had any unforgettable or singular effect on me, although one of my books of her poetry contains a now-yellowed New York Times obituary for her, which I cut out and put in the book in 1974.

It occurs to me that a poem I wrote last year, "Hazardous Duty: Ode to My Kitchen", might work as a response to Sexton's "The Fury of Cooks" in The Death Notebooks. I did not have Sexton in mind at the time I wrote it, however.