Anne Sexton reading her poem “All My Pretty Ones“

Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart where you followed our mother to her cold slumber; a second shock boiling its stone to your heart, leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber you from the residence you could not afford: a gold key, your half of a woolen mill, twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford, the love and legal verbiage of another will, boxes of pictures of people I do not know. I touch their cardboard faces. They must go. But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album, hold me. I stop here, where a small boy waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come… for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy or for this velvet lady who cannot smile. Is this your father’s father, this Commodore in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile has made it unimportant who you are looking for. I’ll never know what these faces are all about. I lock them into their book and throw them out. This is the yellow scrapbook that you began the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly as tobacco leaves