Young
A thousand doors ago
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling under me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother’s window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father’s window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman’s yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.
—Anne Sexton
I read the poem several months back and something about it struck me and I fell in love with it the way you fall in love with a poem when you’ve read it for the first time and it just strummed some chord in you. But, I’ve read this poem before. I’ve not only read it. I included it as an example in a paper I wrote in graduate school (at least 3.5 years ago) about Anne Sexton. This makes me worry just a little about my mind and my memory, but, really, it makes me love the poem a little bit more. I love that after a few years I could come back to the poem and be completely enamored for all new reasons. I think the title is deceiving because I’m not entirely convinced we ever grow out of this phase the poem captures. Oh—and one other thing that totally made rediscovering this poem worth it was the fact that in my book Selected Poems of Anne Sexton, I had used a photo to bookmark this poem’s spot. The photo is of four chickens, roosting in the snow-covered branches of a tree.
-S
