For Anne Sexton, twenty years after her suicide
by Gail
Note: She killed herself in 1973.
So thought the psychiatrist,
groping through his maze of learned assumptions
to reach her in her pain--
that the words would trap the nightmares
in the sticky glare of the paper.
And maybe he was right,
maybe she won extra years
because of the piles of drafts,
acid poured out of her onto the pages.
That was the whole point,
to drain it out, to neutralize it.
Yet the lethal solution continued
to be distilled, to eat at her always.
Perhaps the words became more than exorcism,
weapons more necessary than life
or health or love, another kind of drink,
she the carpenter who built her own coffin,
then the tall gallows.
