How is it that Anne Sexton
got a Pulitzer Prize for describing
her breakdown in riveting metaphor
while my father got the locked
ward at St. Luke’s Hospital?
How is it she could document
her unraveling in the 1960s
but nobody showed her how
to crisscross the threads and weave
them snug to the hem’s edge?
That Miltown could be prescribed
for my father, that he could cross
state lines to double the pills,
that he preferred being groggy
to being alive?
Was art ahead of therapy,
that Anne revealed a ragged world
and killed herself anyway
six years after my father?
My grandmother set her lips
into two hard lines
as she crocheted doilies and tablecloths,
miles of them. After her son died
she dipped them in red dye
so the fibers turned pink, all the better
to cover raw surfaces and render them
stitched and knotted.
Made filigree.
