You spoke to me in the library today, of suicide, of how your mother, the famous poet,
Anne Sexton died first and then later you tried it too, being so overcome from mourning her,
For so long: years melting into depthless pools, spiraling every downwards,
Into a place so deep even you can hardly see it, yet you feel it as I did when, at long last,
I closed your book shut for the final time, like I thought I'd closed the book on Lesley's life,
And would like to on my own...
I am reminded of how, at dusk the other night, that paranoid woman came 'round to our house again,
With her long, strawberry-blond hair, whipped by the wind 'round her worried, guant face,
I watched her with wild-wolf-eyes as, with delicate, slender fingers, she placed her cigarette,
Ever so carefully between her thin lips, inhaling death in the midst of fierce life,
As her lilting Irish accent, so like Lesley's, told me all the conspiracies of her troubled mind,
As Lesley once did so long ago now it seems...
So when you, Linda Gray Sexton, daughter of poetess Anne Sexton, spoke to me in the library,
Of suicide on Mercy Street, I cried, cried, cried when I read your final words, stood up,
Went to the library entrance and saw my dead sister enter a thousand, million times,
Lesley: at the library at the library the library the library...no mercy there either, for me, like there was none,
For Anne Sextone and so, still[/i, after so much time: ] we are all desperately searching,
For Mercy Street, but, I am afraid, like Anne knew, Linda knew and Lesley knew and now I know:
No such address exists.
Helene.