45 Mercy Street

Anne Sexton died in her garage at age 45 as a result of self-induced carbon monoxide poisoning. Her poems haunt me, but I always come back to the first one I read, 45 Mercy Street. Sit in as many poetry circles as you like and discuss until the academic words run dry. To truly feel the weight of this poem, you have to understand loss that starts from inside and reveals itself out. You have to live it to know about this inside out life that makes you invisible to those who should only love you more.

I did not read Anne Sexton's work when I was in high school. I didn't read it in college. I came to it the way I come to most things I like: via the pulsing path of pop culture. Peter Gabriel introduced me to Sexton's work with his song, Mercy Street on the So album. The first time I heard the song, it was as if a grainy flash of familiar images played in my head like a home movie when the film is beginning to break down.

I knew who Anne Sexton was and I knew how she had died; I was not unaware of her as a writer. In high school I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and found it at first incomprehensible. I compensated by re-reading it immediately. The second time was much better, but no less disturbing. Reading Plath's work over the next few years always left me feeling unsettled and little bit afraid of the chaos of the disordered mind. Maybe my neurotransmitters stirred a bit knowing what was eventually in store for me.

Why are you thinking about Sylvia and Anne at 1:15 in the morning, May? You're supposed to be looking for a good quiche recipe for tomorrow's brunch. Stop stalling. You can't get out of it, it's at your house. Smile a lot, look competent, make sure all of your medications are out of sight. Figure out the damn quiche.

Saturday night is the vast wasteland of television. Reruns. Infomercials. Some obscure movie with Demi, Bruce, and Glenne Headley. Flip, flip, flip. Billy Crudup. Why do I know him? Almost Famous. Yeah. What's this movie? Waking the Dead. Waking the Dead? The Scott Spencer novel was made into a movie? How did I manage to not know that? I actually like Scott Spencer's writing. I read Endless Love not because I was inspired by Brooke Shields' acting in the movie adaptation. I never made it more than half-way through the movie, but the book held my attention and felt worth my time.

Waking the Dead was sitting on a sale pile at Barnes and Noble. I saw it, saw the author's name, and bought it. I didn't even know that the story line involved the political fallout of the Pinochet regime's deep cleansing of popular opponents. Having lived in Chile at a time when the news was still scandalizing the car bombings of a former General and his wife in Argentina, followed soon after by a car bombing in Washington, DC involving a former Chilean diplomat and his female associate, the book had meanings within the storyline that wouldn't exist to the casual reader. I liked the book and the mood of it settled over me and draped heavily on my shoulders for weeks. Weeks.

The movie was nearly over when I found it, but I watched it anyway. Near the final scene, Mercy Street enters the soundtrack. As soon as I heard the first, deep notes, I started thinking about Anne Sexton. Peter Gabriel's song is nothing less than an homage to the poet.

Sexton's 45 Mercy Street makes me sad. I get it. Maybe that's why I stopped reading Sexton's work, and Sylvia Plath's, and Virginia Woolf's, as well. Sylvia was truly mad, and her writing was filled with bitterness and anger that became barbed wire tangled into words. Woolf was frustrated, an astute observer who was too incapacitated to participate. She knew it and it killed her. Anne Sexton, though, kept trying to lead a normal life, but her attempts never quite achieved the desired outcome. She was angry and frustrated, but the sadness still ripples through her writing in a way that leaves no doubt what was under her skin, coming from the inside out.

I like this part of the poem:

I walk in a yellow dress
and a white pocketbook stuffed with cigarettes,
enough pills, my wallet, my keys,
and being twenty-eight, or is it forty-five?
I walk. I walk.
I hold matches at street signs
for it is dark,
as dark as the leathery dead
and I have lost my green Ford,
my house in the suburbs,
two little kids
sucked up like pollen by the bee in me
and a husband who has wiped off his eyes
in order not to see my inside out
and I am walking and looking
and this is no dream
just my oily life
where the people are alibis
and the street is unfindable for an
entire lifetime.

I also used to live at number 45. Now I live at 5150, and that, of course, is a police term for the mentally ill. No mercy here, either.