Sainte Anne

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 Sainte Anne 

“You think,” Uncle Albert was saying, “that you might like to meet people that feel more intensely than you do, but you don’t.”

     “Mmmm?” I said, waiting. We were sitting on the sleeping porch, he in the rocker and I on the edge of the narrow bed. The porch is lined with book shelves on the inside wall except over the bed and on the outside under all the windows. He had a used paperback I’d picked up somewhere thinking I’d read it more often than I have, Contemporary American Poetry.

     “Did you ever see a picture of Anne Sexton?”

     “I may have.”

     “She must have been lovely to look at,” he said. He started reading “Music Swims Back to Me” –

Wait Mister. Which way is home?

They turned the light out

and the dark is moving in the corner.

He stopped. “And so on,” he said.

Later, when he’d gone to his room for his before-lunch “lie-down,” I picked up the book. Page 318. I must have read the poem at one time, because there were notes in the margin in my handwriting, something about “making excess simple” and (the one word in small caps) “Husserl.” What I was thinking: at this point, who knows?

Anne Sexton's chair

I sometimes sleep in that single bed on the sleeping porch; sometimes I sleep with Roz in what I increasingly think of as her bed (in her room), sometimes on the double bed in the front bedroom where my desk is, sometimes on the couch in the living room, sometimes on the couch in the room with the TV, sometimes in a chair, sometimes on the floor. Wherever I sleep the dreams have preceded me – they are waiting for the middle of the night to pounce; and when I wake up my brain hurts and my joints, shoulders, elbows, fingers, hips, knees, ankles. The day almost never begins well. I am up by 6:30, but I am never easy before 10:00.

     The uneasiness hasn’t to do with feeling life more intensely than others though. I’m not sure what it has to do with to tell you the truth.

After I read through the poem - “There are no sign posts in this room,” and so forth* - I went down the back stairs to see if Roz had made sandwiches for lunch. She hadn’t, but in the refrigerator on the top shelf were strips of bacon, slices of tomato, and torn lettuce on a plate wrapped in cellophane. There was a sticky-note attached: “Add mayo! (There is bread in the bread box.)”

The weather today is bright enough to hurt your eyes if you stare too long out the window. 

02.13.17

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 * The entire poem is on the audio.