The excitable gift

It was early fall, Madison, 1993. My new friend Michelle lived in the opposite wing of the dorm. She was also a vegetarian, but she was studying biology at the University of Wisconsin and dissecting animals. She also ate Jello. We walked to State Street that night and I was wearing my brand new Mary Janes, non-leather. By the time I got home I had blisters and there was blood all over the back of my socks. We walked a long way in the dark, watching the people around us. State Street was alive with colors, sounds, smells, people, freedom. We went inside a coffee shop that was also a bookstore, and live music was playing. A woman was playing a guitar and singing in the corner. We looked at the books and Michelle bought one by Anne Rice, writing her erotica under the name A. N. Roquelaure. "The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty." She let me borrow it later, and it was just a bunch of spanking. I didn't even finish it. I ran across an audio cassette recording of Anne Sexton reading her own poetry. It was $12. Being a college student, I didn't have a lot of money to spare, but this was my Anne, in her own voice. I bought it, and held onto it while we drank coffee and listened to the music.

I had brought a walkman with me, but it was not working, so I tried desperately to get it fixed so I could listen to the cassette. Eventually I got it working, and while walking to Edgewood (I lived in a mixed dorm off campus) I put the cassette in and pushed play. I will never forget what I heard. She was reading the poem "Her Kind." Her voice was deep, scratchy from the years of smoking and drinking. The recording was shortly before her death, in 1974. I felt her voice go through me like an electric shock. Never before has something affected me like that. I was literally shaking. I could recite the poems right along with her. Words that I had been reading for a few years.

I discovered Anne while browsing the poetry section of the Rochester Public Library one day (the 800 section in the Dewey Decimal System). I was drawn to it because I had the same last name. That was it, that's how intelligent my decision was to read her poetry. I was young, and I had never heard of her. I quickly read everything she had, and learned everything I could about her. Her form of confessional poetry drew me to her. The act of purging oneself of your sinful thoughts and acts using words as therapy. And then being brave enough to bare yourself to the world. Being a woman in a time when women were expected to take care of their children and their husbands and be happy with just that. And although she suffered for years from mental illness and ultimately committed suicide, I prefer not to dwell on her pain and misery anymore. I like to imagine her alive and breathing, reading her poems to a room full of strangers with a cigarette in one hand. I wrote a poem about her once, and I think it's the best poem I have ever written. (That's pretty sad, since I was 16 when I wrote it.) But I will not share it here. Instead I will share words from Anne. The last part the poem called "Live" from her book Live or Die.

I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating the Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.