Freewrite on Anne Sexton

I am closed up inside of a library of closed up books with words stamped orderly onto pages and elderly, browning FLORES MEMORIAL LIBRARY cards clinging to back covers like the afterthought of a tongue added to a human face. It is in the fall after my fifteenth birthday. And I am about to fall hard for the poetry of Anne Sexton.
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I found 'Transformations' first. On choosing it, I am attracted to the title. The back cover tells me: Beware! Keep out of reach of children! These poem-stories are a strange reenactment of seventeen Grimm fairy tales. What is most astonishing about these transformations is that they end up being as wholly personal as Anne Sexton's most intimate poems, coming curiously, for all their story sound, from as deep a place.

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This happens upstairs. On the first floor my friend and I make room from between our biology and algebra textbooks. Their weight is a dead weight. 'Transformations' bleeds, gravitates, yearns, cuts, crawls. It falls on the table and our textbooks pale, smelling too new, their teachings abstract. 'Transformations' has been sleeping on a shelf like a spell, waiting for me to turn fifteen and need it like nothing else.


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 My friend and I read 'Snow White', alternation, taking turns and hopscotching, reading lines aloud.

"Pride pumped in her like poison"

"Snow White walked in the wildwood
for weeks and weeks.
At each turn there were twenty doorways
and at each stood a hungry wolf,
his tongue lolling out like a worm.
The birds called out lewdly,
talking like pink parrots,
and snakes hung down in loops,
each a noose for her sweet white neck"
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I find out that Anne Sexton is a painful type of perfectionist. Her editors could barely understand her handwriting. She would tangle herself up in her words. She would rework each poem until it was red with her pestering, changing a word or a line even as her manuscript was in its final stages of publication. She is the searching type.
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Now her stanzas are making barriers in my head and I'm peaking around them to look out. Her poetry is a thing film rolled up and playing under my eyelids, her words rattle my rib cage. I frame bits of my life, my understanding, by quoting her. That night I go home and read her in bed and the next day  I catch a cold so that  I am allowed to sit still and read her some more.

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I love fairy tales, old worlds translated by time and survived by language. I love her retellings.

I get home to my room and my bookshelf and look up Anne Sexton's name in the index of a literature textbook.
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I find out that she killed herself at 45. I put her in past tense. I feel history moving through a train and the history of her life in dates progressing towards me. I am hit as this runs a worm hole through my intestines.

I feel the tiny bit shattered.