Maxine Kumin: On Being Asked to Write a Poem in Memory of Anne Sexton

The elk discards his antlers every spring.
They rebud, they grow, they are growing

an inch a day to form a rococo rack
with a five-foot spread even as we speak:

cartilage at first, covered with velvet;
bendable, tender gristle, yet

destined to ossify, the velvet sloughed off,
hanging in tatters from alders and scrub growth.

No matter how hardened it seems there was pain.
Blood on the snow from rubbing, rubbing, rubbing.

What a heavy candelabrum to be borne
forth, each year more elaborately turned:

the special issues, the prizes in her name.
Above the mantle the late elk’s antlers gleam.

Written several years after Sexton's suicide in 1974. I wish I could respect this poem more. It reads, terribly and maybe inevitably, like distancing rather than confrontation. Sexton and Kumin had had an intensely close, inspiring friendship; Kumin must have felt not only devastated but betrayed by the suicide (the two had lunched together only hours before Sexton killed herself). The poem's central image of animal pain ("rubbing, rubbing, rubbing") is framed too elaborately, too heavily for the image to be projected as the pain of either of the humans involved. Emotion's confusion is finally ground up in the lugubrious mortar of the last line, with all those liquid l's thwarted by the ugly consonants. Kumin knows, or feels, things she can't bring out. The title's ambiguity hints at why the poem turns from itself: it's both an attempt and a refusal to write a poem in memoriam.