The Abortion

The Abortion

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Just as the earth puckered its mouth, each bud puffing out from its knot, I changed my shoes, and then drove south.

Up past the Blue Mountains, where Pennsylvania humps on endlessly, wearing, like a crayoned cat, its green hair,

its roads sunken in like a gray washboard; where, in truth, the ground cracks evilly', a dark socket from which the coal has poured,

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

the grass as bristly and stout as chives, and me wondering when the ground would break, and me wondering how anything fragile survives;

up in Pennsylvania, I met a little man, not Rumpelstiltskin, at all, at all . . . he took the fullness that love began.

Returning north, even the sky grew thin like a high window looking nowhere. The road was as flat as a sheet of tin.

Somebody who should have been born is gone.

Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.

Anne Sexton c. 1963

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