Anne Sexton / And one for my dame

 

and one for my dame

By Anne Sexton

A born salesman,

my father made all his dough

by selling wool to Fieldcrest, Woolrich and Faribo.

–

A born talker,

he could sell one hundred wet-down bales

of that white stuff. He could clock the miles and sales

–

and make it pay.

At home each sentence he would utter

had first pleased the buyer who’d paid him off in butter.

–

Each word

had been tried over and over, at any rate,

on the man who was sold by the man who filled my plate.

–

My father hovered

over the Yorkshire pudding and the beef:

a peddler, a hawker, a merchant and an Indian chief.

–

Roosevelt! Willkie! and war!

How suddenly gauche I was

with my old-maid heart and my funny teenage applause.

–

Each night at home

my father was in love with maps

while the radio fought its battles with Nazis and Japs.

–

Except when he hid

in his bedroom on a three-day drunk,

he typed out complex itineraries, packed his trunk,

–

his matched luggage

and pocketed a confirmed reservation,

his heart already pushing over the red routes of the nation.

–

I sit at my desk

each night with no place to go,

opening the wrinkled maps of Milwaukee and Buffalo,

–

the whole U.S.,

its cemeteries, its arbitrary time zones,

through routes like small veins, capitals like small stones.

–

He died on the road,

pushed from neck to back,

his white hanky signaling from the window of the Cadillac,

–

My husband,

as blue-eyed as a picture book, sells wool:

boxes of card waste, laps and rovings he can pull

–

to the thread

and say Leicester, Rambouillet, Merino,

a half-blood, it’s greasy and thick, yellow as old snow.

–

And when you drive off, my darling,

Yes, sir! Yes, sir! It’s one for my dame,

your sample cases branded with my father’s name,

–

your itinerary open,

its tolls ticking and greedy,

its highways built up like new loves, raw and speedy.