Today after the lorazepam fogs my tongue, I write to you in the steam.
Today I want to read Adrienne Rich to you.
(—I didn’t tell you, Naomi—I feel so afraid of intervention, like Sexton and her thorazine—
Thorazine, they say, is supposed to make the rhymer go away.)
The poem begins easily enough: there’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill.
Each time I read this poem I imagine myself standing among these trees, eyes cast toward the meeting house, waiting for the wreck to arrive.
How many times have I already failed you?
Our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, Rich writes, its own ways of making people disappear.
Or myself—how death sucks his teeth at me from inside the bottle of pills.
A friend tells me You must take care of yourself, now more than ever.
But if I lose my vigilance—
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
Some nights I spin the round white moon on the counter before dissolving it in my mouth.
I imagine it guiding us to safety.
After all, Naomi, why do I tell you anything?
Because you still listen.
Works Cited
Rich, Adrienne. “What Kind of Times Are These.” Collected Poems 1950-2012 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016).
Wood Middlebrook, Diane. Anne Sexton: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1992).