All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton

<p>Production and Sound Design by Kevin Seaman</p><p>All My Pretty Ones</p><p>By Anne Sexton</p><p>Father, this year’s jinx rides us apart</p><p>where you followed our mother to her cold slumber;</p><p>a second shock boiling its stone to your heart,  </p><p>leaving me here to shuffle and disencumber  </p><p>you from the residence you could not afford:  </p><p>a gold key, your half of a woolen mill,</p><p>twenty suits from Dunne’s, an English Ford,  </p><p>the love and legal verbiage of another will,  </p><p>boxes of pictures of people I do not know.</p><p>I touch their cardboard faces. They must go.</p><p> </p><p>But the eyes, as thick as wood in this album,  </p><p>hold me. I stop here, where a small boy</p><p>waits in a ruffled dress for someone to come ...  </p><p>for this soldier who holds his bugle like a toy  </p><p>or for this velvet lady who cannot smile.  </p><p>Is this your father’s father, this commodore</p><p>in a mailman suit? My father, time meanwhile  </p><p>has made it unimportant who you are looking for.  </p><p>I’ll never know what these faces are all about.  </p><p>I lock them into their book and throw them out.</p><p> </p><p>This is the yellow scrapbook that you began</p><p>the year I was born; as crackling now and wrinkly  </p><p>as tobacco leaves: clippings where Hoover outran  </p><p>the Democrats, wiggling his dry finger at me</p><p>and Prohibition; news where the Hindenburg went  </p><p>down and recent years where you went flush  </p><p>on war. This year, solvent but sick, you meant  </p><p>to marry that pretty widow in a one-month rush.  </p><p>But before you had that second chance, I cried  </p><p>on your fat shoulder. Three days later you died.</p><p> </p><p>These are the snapshots of marriage, stopped in places.  </p><p>Side by side at the rail toward Nassau now;</p><p>here, with the winner’s cup at the speedboat races,  </p><p>here, in tails at the Cotillion, you take a bow,</p><p>here, by our kennel of dogs with their pink eyes,  </p><p>running like show-bred pigs in their chain-lin