Most mornings I read Rumi, his verse as shimmery and expansive as a length of fine silk. But recently I read One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes by Anne Sexton, a brutal poem about mutant children and their mothers from a book of retold fairy tales. Of course original fairy tales are all grotesques, so perhaps the brutality is borrowed. She has stuck in my mind…a thorn that has made a small tear in the silk.
I think, am I “strong as a telephone pole”? Do I wear “my martyrdom like a string of pearls”? I did not look up whether martyr is related to martinet or marteau, the French word for hammer. A string of pearls initially bespeaks grace, delicacy, and status. But each pearl is hard, opaque, and perfect. Perfect, unlike the children for whom we martyr ourselves.
I am drawn to balancing Anne Sexton against Rumi, carefully weighing being too nice, overlooking too much bad behaviour, refraining from rolling my eyes, suffering fools and foolish ideas, dulling my points, retracting my claws, stifling yawns against breaking open the ugly clamshell to find nothing nacreous within, only the irritant, only my mother talking to me through Anne Sexton about things she didn’t say. While my mother was still alive I thought of getting her to write, of promising it would not be read in her lifetime. I decided against the idea; what she wrote might be unwelcomingly delusional, false, painful, hurtful, unverifiable. I realize now that would not have mattered. It was the inside of her messy mind and now it is gone. Could Anne Sexton be a surrogate? By examining her messy mind can I better examine my own?