I haven’t dressed up or truly celebrated Halloween in many years and after seeing the adults walking the streets of D.C. today in broad daylight, I think I’m going to say that’s been a good decision. Cat ears and a pinned on tail, a stocking cap with a plastic butcher’s knife on top and plastic blood, the two crazy people who wore masks to work out in at the WSC in Columbia Heights—really, do you need to wear that on a Saturday when you’re sweating on the elliptical or doing errands at Target at 4pm? I don’t think so.
That said, tonight’s post will honor ghosts, those in the poem and that of the writer herself who seems to have been haunted throughout her life which sadly ended in suicide. Anne Sexton was a contemporary of Sylvia Plath and the arcs of their lives are eerily similar. Suicide attempts, psychiatric wards, bones trembling within beautiful skin. Poetry seems to be the one solace or escape for each of them, especially for Sexton who started writing upon the advice of a doctor treating her.
Although Sexton writes about ghosts, I think she herself is one, somewhere her troubled spirit lives on.
Ghosts
by Anne Sexton
Some ghosts are women,
neither abstract nor pale,
their breasts as limp as killed fish.
Not witches, but ghosts
who come, moving their useless arms
like forsaken servants.
Not all ghosts are women,
I have seen others;
fat, white-bellied men,
wearing their genitals like old rags.
Not devils, but ghosts.
This one thumps barefoot, lurching
above my bed.
But that isn't all.
Some ghosts are children.
Not angels, but ghosts;
curling like pink tea cups
on any pillow, or kicking,
showing their innocent bottoms, wailing
for Lucifer.
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