On the night of Anne Sexton’s reading at Harvard’s Sanders Hall. From Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, by Linda Gray Sexton. Linda Gray Sexton was a sophomore at Harvard on the evening of this performance.

She had called beforehand to ask if I would object if she dedicated the Sanders reading to me. I was so thoroughly ambivalent about the entire matter that I told her I liked the idea of the dedication but I wished she would not name me. Nevertheless, I worried she would go ahead and do it anyway.

Perhaps part of me, despite my proud stand, wished she would defy me. As much as I did not wish to be recognized, I also craved the honor. I did not want to be recognized as “Anne Sexton’s daughter,” and I was running from that label as hard as I could. And yet, there were the benefits: the extra attention, the second look an instructor might give my work, the small amount of notoriety among my peers that came from being the child of a famous person.

The crowd grew restless and impatient. The time for starting was past. I fingered my watch and wondered if something had happened to her. And then suddenly I saw her arrive at the back of the stage. The audience leaned forward in anticipation, hushed. Quickly, it seemed, Wakefield’s introduction was over. I watched my mother cross the stage, as if she were a stranger, as if she were merely a performer I had paid to see. In her long, tight black-and-white dress she came to rest against the podium, gripping it tightly; six books and manuscript in hand, a glass of water on the lectern, her glasses, her cigarettes; she fumbled with the mike. I was sure her knees were shaking behind the skirt of that long dress.

She began to speak. “Only once in my life have I dedicated a reading,” she began. Her words were slurred and furry, running into each other, nearly unintelligible. Oh God, I thought, she’s too drunk to read! I closed my eyes, slid down in my seat, and tried to pray. “A short dedication,” she went on, still sloppy, “however tonight I’m in a—one must be in a mood for something--and I was in a mood to give her a little longer dedication. I’d like to start it and then repeat with John F. Kennedy’s unsaid—but of course the speech was passed on to the press—unsaid words in Dallas in 1963. . . .”

Suddenly, dramatically, she straightened up, squared her marvelous shoulders. Her voice caught hold and began to move in tandem with her brain. “ . . . Unless the Lord keepeth the city, the watchman guardeth in vain.” In an instant, she was electric, radiant. She continued, stronger now.

And with these words in mind I would like to dedicate this reading to a nameless woman. There are many kinds of love—woman to man, mother to child, woman to woman, man to man, god to us, us to God, and friend to friend. Each love declares welcome. We give and we take. Love makes us at times the watchman. I think tonight of that woman who is very far away and somehow very near and speak not only to all of you but to name her without name. Once I gave her playing names like Bobolink or Pie or Stringbean.

I began to cry with, tears running down my face.

And life passes on and the near become far and the watchman, ah, the watchman. Better said, “Unless the Lord keepeth the city, the watchman guardeth in vain.” And I ask you to wonder with me tonight if this strange art, this writing, this reading of poems, this watchman here before you, this poet speaking in her assortment of souls. Who guards poem by poem, but perhaps this, too . . . is in vain.

I bowed my head and let the tears fall like stones into my lap. She began reading “Her Kind,” her signature poem, but I was trying to recover myself. I didn’t know what the dedication meant. I couldn’t begin to unravel it in the intensity of that moment. I only knew that the connection between us that night feels as strong as if it were twenty years before and we were still tied together, body to body.

Listen to “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman”

Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman

By Anne Sexton

My daughter, at eleven
(almost twelve), is like a garden.

Oh, darling! Born in that sweet birthday suit
and having owned it and known it for so long,
now you must watch high noon enter -
noon, that ghost hour.
Oh, funny little girl – this one under a blueberry sky,
this one! How can I say that I've known
just what you know and just where you are?

It's not a strange place, this odd home
where your face sits in my hand
so full of distance,
so full of its immediate fever.
The summer has seized you,
as when, last month in Amalfi, I saw
lemons as large as your desk-side globe -
that miniature map of the world -
and I could mention, too,
the market stalls of mushrooms
and garlic buds all engorged.
Or I think even of the orchard next door,
where the berries are done
and the apples are beginning to swell.
And once, with our first backyard,
I remember I planted an acre of yellow beans
we couldn't eat.

Oh, little girl,
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way.
You are too many to eat.

I hear
as in a dream
the conversation of the old wives
speaking of womanhood.
I remember that I heard nothing myself.
I was alone.
I waited like a target.

Let high noon enter –
the hour of the ghosts.
Once the Romans believed
that noon was the ghost hour,
and I can believe it, too,
under that startling sun,
and someday they will come to you,
someday, men bare to the waist, young Romans
at noon where they belong,
with ladders and hammers
while no one sleeps.

But before they enter
I will have said,
Your bones are lovely,
and before their strange hands
there was always this hand that formed.

Oh, darling, let your body in,
let it tie you in,
in comfort.
What I want to say, Linda,
is that women are born twice.

If I could have watched you grow
as a magical mother might,
if I could have seen through my magical transparent belly,
there would have been such a ripening within:
your embryo,
the seed taking on its own,
life clapping the bedpost,
bones from the pond,
thumbs and two mysterious eyes,
the awfully human head,
the heart jumping like a puppy,
the important lungs,
the becoming -
while it becomes!
as it does now,
a world of its own,
a delicate place.

I say hello
to such shakes and knockings and high jinks,
such music, such sprouts,
such dancing-mad-bears of music,
such necessary sugar,
such goings-on!

Oh, little girl,
my stringbean,
how do you grow?
You grow this way.
You are too many to eat.

What I want to say, Linda,
is that there is nothing in your body that lies.
All that is new is telling the truth.
I'm here, that somebody else,
an old tree in the background.

Darling,
stand still at your door,
sure of yourself, a white stone, a good stone -
as exceptional as laughter
you will strike fire,
that new thing!

.