Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter

Friday, February 11, 2005

Pain For a Daughter by Anne Sexton

Blind with love, my daughter
has cried nightly for horses,
those long-necked marchers and churners
that she has mastered, any and all,
reining them in like a circus hand-
the exitable muscles and the ripe neck;
tending, this summer, a pony and a foal.
She who is too squeamish to pull
a thorn from the dog's paw
watched her pony blossom with distemper,
the underside of the jaw swelling
like an enormous grape.
Gritting her teeth with love
she drained the boil and scoured it
with hydrogen peroxide until pus
ran like milk on the barn floor.

Blind with loss all winter,
in dungarees, a ski jacket, and a hard hat,
she visits the neighbor's stable,
our acreage not zoned for barns;
they who own the flamining horses
and the swan-whipped thoroughbred
that she tugs at and cajoles,
thinking it will burn like a furnace
under her small-hipped English seat.

Blind with pain she limps home.
The thoroughbred has stood on her foot.
He rested there like a building.
He grew into her foot like they were one.
The marks of the horseshoes printed
into her flesh, the tips of her toes
ripped off like pieces of leather,
three toenails swirled like shells
and left to float in blood in her riding boot.

Blind with fear she sits on the toilet,
her foot balanced over the washbasin,
her father, hydrogen peroxide in hand,
performing the rites of the cleansing.
She bites on a towel, sucked-in breath,
sucked-in and arched against the pain,
her eyes glancing off me where
I stand at the door, eyes locked
on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,
and then she cries...
"Oh my God, help me!"
Where a child would have cried Mama!
Where a child would have believed Mama!
She bit the towel and called on God
and I saw her life stretched out...
I saw her torn in childbirth,
and I saw her, in that moment,
in her own death and I knew that she
knew.

~ Anne Sexton

- From Tangled Vines: A Collection of Mother and Daughter Poems, edited by Lyn Lifshin (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, publ. 1992)
-Reprinted from Live or Die by Anne Sexton (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1966)


This one really jumped out at me when I was reading through the book, partly because this is one of my favorite poets, and also maybe I was missing my daughter back in the midwest...

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